So, what exactly do you do? Part Two.
(This is Part Two of an unnecessarily long-winded explanation of how I ended up drawing stupid things on post-it notes for a living. You can find part 1 here)
Part 2: A Gratuitous Cock.
I made a promise to myself before moving to London that I wouldn’t do that thing that Australians seem to do when they move to London, which is automatically go and hang out with a bunch of other Australians. So while sitting on the plane, somewhere high above the Arabian sea and halfway to London, I imagined all the English friends I’d find there, and how I’d have to fight to retain my Australian accent as I subconsciously picked up more and more of the accents of all my new amazing British friends.
That was almost two years ago and since then my accent hasn’t changed a bit. So, you do the math.
Within two weeks of arriving, I’d ended up at a pub for a friend of a friend’s going-away or something or other (it doesn’t really matter) what does matter in this particular case was that everyone there was Australian, and within 20 minutes I was best friends with them all.
I know, I know; call it lazy if you like, but really when it comes down to it this rag-tag bunch of expats seemed to all have the same attitude as me which was A: Let’s be friends and B: Let’s go do stuff. Two things that people with existing friends and experiences in London are less inclined to do, and I don’t blame them; if a Londoner had arrived in Melbourne wanting to be friends I would have told them I had enough trouble retaining the friends I barely already had, let alone playing tourist guide to a new one who seemed way more energetic and excited about the city than was really warranted.
So a bunch of excitable Australians it was. Why is all this important? Because within that group emerged a smaller group of five of us.
I assume before the internet, friendship groups tended to revolve around shared interests, or perhaps a common denominator like a job, or a local pub. The thing is, I’m fairly certain a large reason the five of us became close friends was because we all happened to become ensnared in the same Whatsapp group which in turn ended up taking on an entertaining life of its own.
I’m not sure why we decided to make a Whatsapp group for the 5 of us, but what I do recall is that it was right after an exhaustive conversation covering the act of rimming, resulting in the subsequent group being called ‘Rimmers’. As with most whatsapp groups, nobody bothered to change the name and it quickly lost its sexual connotation and resulted in the five of us affectionately referring to each other as ‘Rimmers’ or just straight up ‘Rims’ making the act of yelling at one another across a crowded pub slightly problematic, albeit entertaining.
But ‘The Rimmers’ were a tight bunch. The Whatsapp group saw a lot of post-weekend debrief chatter, so much so that I’d have to switch my phone to ‘do not disturb’ in order to stop it from vibrating more or less constantly all Monday morning and revealing to my boss that I was, as he’d always suspected, doing no work whatsoever.
In order to maintain this very thin facade of a productive employee, I stopped trying to reply to the group via texting, and instead drew things on some post-it notes that happened to be nearby. I then took a quick photo of them and sent them through to the group.
This, was the first one:
As you can see, it’s referencing a conversation discussing the attractiveness of Gal (one of the members of the group), but instead of leaving it at just a simple X,Y graph, I instead flexed some comedic muscle and turned the line into a large erect penis. Classic stuff.
From there the graphs and drawings became more and more prevalent on the group and the other members began suggesting that maybe they might be better on an Instagram. I told them unequivocally that this was a terrible idea and nothing would come of it. Yet still they persisted, and at every get together they’d ask me when ‘Insta-chaz’ was going to start, a name they’d started using as a placeholder for the as-yet-unnamed Instagram that they were convinced I should create.
Eventually I gave in and more as a means of proving just how wrong they were I begrudgingly started the Instagram, mindlessly naming it Instachaaz with two a’s because the other spelling was taken. Within a few weeks it hit 5000 followers, and then over a particularly surreal weeks a few months later, jumped from 6000 to 60,000 and I was forced to admit that maybe the rimmers had been right all along.
Regardless of how big it gets though, It’s humbling to remember that the entire thing started with a gratuitous drawing of an erect penis, and some very good, very persistent friends who I’m forever indebted to.
