Contact<\/a><\/p>\nSome guy that works in an office doing some bullshit email that doesn’t really matter because he’s wholly replaceable by some other over-educated human in a $400 suit is hurting this morning after spending the weekend caning himself in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
While it wasn’t a traditional Singapore-style lashing of the buttocks, it was Matthew Smith’s spirit and soul that received the metaphorical slashes from the kendo stick of bad choices.<\/p>\n
Because he works in the middle floors of a skyscraper in Betoota’s financial district, in a mid-level law firm that does unglamorous contract grunt work that’s ripe for replacement by the common robot, and he went to an outer-metro mid-level non-Catholic-but-Christian-adjacent private school that takes part in strange sports like field hockey and volleyball, follows American football where he confidently knows the rules, Smith has a crippling gambling addiction that nobody really knows about.<\/p>\n
Colleagues have said Smith looks very tired after his weekend watching the gridiron in Melbourne, but they don’t know the true wellspring of his misery.<\/p>\n
Yes, his liver looks like a butcher’s bin that’s been left out in the sun all week. Yes, he looks like he’s woken up in the morgue. Yes, he smells a bit like urine. All of those things point to a time well had, if you’re into that thing. He didn’t get on the bags because he doesn’t know how to get them. If someone presented some before him, on a piss-soaked toilet paper dispenser in a Melbourne pub after the game, he would’ve let out his best Jackie Chan ‘Waaaaaaaah!’, struck a pose, then hoovered the whole line up one nostril, as is tradition in his culture.<\/p>\n
But a layer on top of that utter depletion is his financial situation. He’s overdrawn, he’s put a month’s pay’s worth of savings through PigBet. Now PigBet has offered him counselling and the chance to win it all back at Sha Tin tonight.<\/p>\n
Smith refused to speak to our reporter in the line for coffee this morning, downstairs at the shared cafe we have in our building. And fair enough.<\/p>\n
More to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IMRAN GASHKORI | Sport Editor | Contact Some guy that works in an office doing some bullshit email…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":891202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":["post-891201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=891201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/891202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=891201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=891201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=891201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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