Le Hill du Box

Yesterday morning I was looking closely at the operations of my espresso coffee machine. It was really lovely - you turned the knob and soon everything in the room was wreathed in clouds of steam, and the end result was a small amount of coffee being produced in my cup. It's the sort of espresso maker that you might like to boast about as a kind of status symbol of sophistication, but really, I just like it because it's a machine. I like how you just have to plug it in and turn a knob to make it go.

By chance, later that day I happened to be in, of all places, Box Hill Centro, and entirely confused. If only that had something so simple as a button you could press to make it go. Or to make it stop - is there a button to make it stop? - please tell me there's a button that activates a stopping mechanism. Nothing so simple or lovely as a machine, is Box Hill Centro. Rather, it appears to be a multi-spatial-hyper-transport-non-Euclidean-geometrical-postmodern-economic-zones-existence-entity*. Everywhere everyone seemed to be running around buying everything and running into everyone else, which was geospatially inconvenient. People from points  A, B, C, and D were perpetually converging on point E and then suffering the consequences. And I know it's wrong to make sweeping ethnic or racial generalisations, but Box Hill Centro appears to be overrun with Box Hillians. Really, I felt like I was in a foreign country or something.

The key to understanding Box Hill Centro, or what purported to be playing that purpose, was the map of the whole farrago at the entrance. And what a befuddling map that was. Every store was labelled with a number, and beside that number there was also a confusing compass point (North or South, if memory serves me correctly), and when I went walking around looking for the stores I couldn't find them anyway, and also anyway, none of them had the numbers that they had on the map. And plus also anyway, when I went upstairs all of a sudden I found I wasn't in Box Hill Centro anymore I was in....

... a bus station... ? 

... all of which buses seemed to be running from Box Hill Centro to other shopping centres of note. I spotted one going to Doncaster, and another heading off to Chadstone, and I bet there was a Northland one as well. What is it with buses and shopping centres? Has the government (whoever they are, or were, or might be) decided that the purpose of the public transport system should be linking up multi-spatial-hyper-transport-non-Euclidean-geometrical-postmodern-economic-zones-existence-entities with one another? Is there any way of escaping? Can I just press a button? PLEASE TELL ME THERE'S A BUTTON TO MAKE IT STOP....

Ahem. I think I'll go back and make myself another coffee now.

* I could probably turn all of that into an acronym but it would be almost as long, and just as confusing.