A bank employee on Collins Street was seen carrying a large, fully closed golf umbrella through the CBD yesterday, wielding it less as weather protection and more as a kind of ceremonial walking stick, after a forecast described only as "possible showers" failed, once again, to produce anything of the sort.
It travelled with him on the train from the outer suburbs, stayed tucked under one arm for the walk from Flinders Street up Elizabeth Street and along to Collins Street — the one stretch of the commute where rain might have actually mattered — and made it into the office bone dry, at no point required, and at no point put down for long.
"I checked the app this morning and it just said 20 percent," he said, tapping the umbrella's tip lightly against the pavement as he walked, the way one might absentmindedly tap a cane while thinking. "Twenty percent isn't nothing. You can't just leave it at home on a twenty percent."
By mid-morning, the umbrella had become something closer to an accessory than a tool, propped against his desk during meetings, leaned on slightly while waiting for the lift, and carried, tip-down, through the length of the CBD at lunch, swinging gently with each step in a manner colleagues described as "surprisingly debonair."
No rain fell at any point during the day. The sky, if anything, cleared further by early afternoon, a development the man received not with relief but with the mild, practiced resignation of someone who has made this exact bet and lost it many times before.
"It's not really about whether it rains," he said, boarding his train home, umbrella now tucked neatly under one arm. "It's about not being the guy who didn't bring one."