Today’s episode is about hitchhiking, and that choice you have to make when someone pulls over to give you a ride: Should I trust this person? Listen to four tales where this was a difficult question to answer. Note: Contains R-rated language and themes. Features: A paranoid fellow wielding a machete and asking where I liveLooking for love in the wrong places, by a driver obsessed with porn and a shade removed from realityIncredibly inappropriate humour during a high-speed dash through Hamilton, New ZealandThrowing caution to the wind in Japan in the pursuit of maximum freedom, but then hopping in a car with a guy claiming “gun”Support the show (https://www.withoutahitch.co.nz/subscriptions/)

Today’s episode is about work. It chronicles a series of jobs that I thought were terrible at the time, although perhaps I should have given them more of a chance. I was young, and didn’t yet have much of a work ethic. Features: Riding the zeitgeist and cleaning toilets – epiphanies while working the nightshiftKiwifruit, Viagra and the gift of rain – trying and failing to develop a work ethicAnimal impressions, chess addiction and meaningful work – attempting to be an upstanding museum worker, with mixed resultsGoogle Doc lurkers – why are people always in that Google Doc, week after week, month after month?Support the show (https://www.withoutahitch.co.nz/subscriptions/)

Today’s episode is about teaching, including what it’s like to be a teacher, plus the impression we might form of our own teachers. Features:A story of teaching in Japan and trying to melt the ice with difficult colleaguesThe performance of teaching gone wrong, plus trying to balance pet and family life in the backgroundBurning out and leaving the teaching profession, including the responses of colleagues, and the guiltAn almost unbelievable tale of a primary school trip to the sewage treatment plant – coordinated by a teacher who truly must have drawn the short strawSupport the show (https://www.withoutahitch.co.nz/subscriptions/)

Today’s episode is about school and a little about hard luck – negotiating the slings and arrows of a boarding school in the nineties, and finding the humour in all of it. Features:Some background notes on what school is really forThe story of a duckling, a Vauxhall Viva, and the deep irony of trying to do the right thing but making things much, much worseAn examination of a really, really big nose, and how (strangely) it was excluded from the bullying canonSupport the show (https://www.withoutahitch.co.nz/subscriptions/)

Today’s episode is about names – the names we choose for ourselves, and how we might “make a name for ourselves”. Features:The story behind the name “Without a hitch”A troupe of guys all called John, how I distinguished between them, and my attempts to make a name for myself amongst “the Johns”The hilarious and odd pet names we decided against, after a democratic process to decide on a name for pet #12Support the show (https://www.withoutahitch.co.nz/subscriptions/)

Today’s theme is impressions. What feelings or impressions do you get when you first meet someone, or experience something for the first time? What things stay with you, and what effect do they have on you?Features a housesitter called Digby and a comprehensive list of flatting horrors.Support the show (https://www.withoutahitch.co.nz/subscriptions/)