Category: Journal

Had a weird phonecall moment yesterday. I went to call Fliss on my desk phone at work, quickly dialing in the familiar number on the keypad and placing the receiver to my ear… as you do.

I heard the pip-pa-ra-pip sounds you get when a nearby mobile phone is receiving a call or message, and glancing down at my mobile I saw that I had an incoming call on that. The phone I had dialed on the desk phone started ringing then too.

Thinking quickly, I decided to keep on with the desk phone call and answer my mobile at the same time. Sometimes Fliss and I have this uncanny knack of e-mailing each other at the same time during a working day, so I figured that she might be calling me on my mobile as I was calling her on the phone at home.

I pressed answer on the mobile and lifted it to my left ear. At the same time the ringing on the receiver of the desk phone also stopped. Thinking back, I don’t know why I didn’t figure out that I had dialed my own number – it seems pretty obvious now.

“Hello?” I said. The hello went into the microphones of both the desk phone receiver and the mobile, and raced across the networks to their respective ears on my head. I was kind of startled at hearing my own voice come out of both the ear pieces, but instantly realised what I’d done.

I did try to stifle my laughter, but when I could hear myself stifling the laughter in time-shifted stereo it only served to make me laugh properly. Hearing that was even funnier, but I felt stupid at this point and decided to hang up on myself.

I recently treated myself to the box set of the TwilightZone tv series from 1985 – the first episode of which features Bruce Willis as a man who calls himself by accident. If that episode is anything to go by, doing that kind of thing can have terrible consequences – I was lucky to get away with it! ;o)

I made yet another trip down to London last weekend to go see the AFL exhibition match between the West Coast Eagles and the Freemantle Dockers. After grabbing some food on the Friday evening we spent five hours unsuccessfully trying to win the “international cup” with Scotland in Pro Evolution Soccer 4.

On Saturday, the footie Oz style turned out to be a rather scrappy match, which was but a sideshow to the atmosphere and the beers. As it turned out, we missed the entire third quarter queing for beer, but at least the banter in the lines was good for a laugh and there were some pretty tasty aussie chicks milling about in there too. ;o)

The drinking went on all day, with a trip to Iain’s local Indian restaurant with its bring your own beer policy, then a few drinks in a nearby pub for the leaving do of Iain’s housemate. It was an exhausting day in the end, but pretty good fun – it would have been great if the game had been more entertaining.

Waking with a bit of a hangover the next day, the five and a half hour journey home courtesy of Virgin Rail and a track failure was a bit of a pain. Fortunately a mate at work had loaned me Tim Vine‘s dvd to watch, which made the last hour or so pass with great mirth – much to the amusement of fellow passengers on the epic journey, I’m sure.

That’s it for me and London for a while. Well, two weeks, actually, then I’m down for a work related event, but other than that I’ve had enough of making the trip for a good while. Cousin Iain is just going to have to visit me if we ever hope to make any progress with our Pro Evo teamwork.

Myself and a mate at work had a game of tennis the week before I went on holiday, and after weeks of failing to organise it we actually had a good game. Word spread quickly about the fun that could be had from a mid day knock-up, to the point where we now we have six of us playing at lunchtimes, with money being invested in new equipment by some.

It’s a long time since I’ve played a lot of tennis – we’re going back almost ten years here – and I have to say I’m a bit rusty. I’m getting less than 10% of my first serves in, and my lame ass second serves are easy return fodder. Once the ball is in play my shots are a little eratic, too, although I’m getting my eye back in slowly but surely. Fortunately, the fact that none of us have played a great deal has made the games competitive and comical in equal measure, so it’s a good laugh as well as a bit of exersize.

I used to look forward to lunch times so I could play a game at my desk for sixty minutes, but it seems so much healthier to get away from the monitor or screen and run around instead. I couldn’t play tennis every day of the week, admittedly, but every other day would be spot on. Hopefully we can keep the momentum up through the winter now that there’s a solid group of us who are up for it – by next summer I might have gotten that first serve ratio up above 20% ;o)