I’m not normally the biggest sports fan around, but the Olympics has got me interested. It’s not been hard to get interested in the last few days, with Australia picking up swags of medals. Makes up for the pathetic performance of the first few days. Now as of the time of writing we’re ranking seventh in the world (yesterday we got as high as fifth) - which I think is pretty damn good for a pissy little country of 18 million people. At least now we’re beating Belgium.

Actually, it’s interesting how the medal tally listed on the evening news showed the top six yesterday, but now we’ve fallen to seventh seems to show the top seven.

Channel 7 will be pleased. At last their almost xenophobic coverage, giving anything in which an Australian is mentioned priority over just about anything else, is paying off. Every medal ceremony with an Aussie is shown live, of course. But it’s probably the same in every country. And it works - it brings a lump to the throat as Advance Australia Fair pumps over the PA in Atlanta while the flag slowly ascends.

Don’t you love when your country’s about to win gold, and the two commentators start shouting over each other in an effort to be the one heard on all the news reports that night? And presumably they hope to be The Voice on the archive footage for years to come.

The one gold medal that’s really captured the headlines was Kieran "I write my name on my milk" Perkins, who won the 1500 metres freestyle. (I presume that’s swimming.) The TV and newspapers have gone Keiren-mad. I think it’s gone a bit too far. We may have a bit of a Keiran surplus. The nation may be a little Perkined-out by now.

In fact, I distinctly heard Sandy Roberts say that Kieren had "the heart of Phar Lap" - a phrase that H.G. used jokingly on Club Buggery a few weeks ago. Of course, there’s no real evidence that KP has had the great horse’s heart transplanted into him. If he had, we’d be shouting more about our medical technology than sporting prowess.

Probably by now everyone outside Australia is wondering if I’ll mention any other countries. Yep. I can’t go past the efforts of the mother-country, Great Britain. They’re not exactly blitzing the competition, are they? How are the Poms ranking? 26th? Just above Moldavia or someone? What the hell’s going on? Two medals?! What happened to Rule Britannia?

It’s just as well the economic rationalists haven’t got to the Olympic teams. What if they were to look at medal/participant ratios? They might decide it wasn’t worth sending a whole hockey team for a chance at winning only one medal - it’s better value to send more swimmers or runners.

No sign of an Olympic song this time round. Or maybe I’ve just been incredibly lucky at avoiding it. Or maybe I have heard it, but I thought it was just another obscure Optus or McDonald’s commercial with a world togetherness theme and a massacred John Lennon tune?

I remember Barcelona’s song, though I wish I didn’t. I don’t remember what the songs were for LA or Seoul… the one I do remember is Moscow’s in 1980. Now that was an Olympic song that captured some of the culture of the host country! And Kossack dancers in the video clip, if I remember rightly! What will it be for Sydney 2000? Rolf? Oils? Yothu Yindi? Daryl? Jack? Drag out an old tape of Peter Allen or Skyhooks? Who knows.

I’m still coming to the terms of the idea of Beach Volleyball as an Olympic sport. I mean beach volleyball? Do they play it on a real beach, or an artificial, astro-sand one? Maybe there’s room for other beach activities at the Games. Olympic paddling. Olympic sunbaking. Olympic sand-castle building?

Another office re-organisation looms at work. It means I’ll sit at the fourth - or is it fifth - desk in less than two years. Even now I can see the high level managers in a boardroom somewhere with a chess board-like diagram of the building, moving pieces around, deciding which departments move to other sites.

The actual move doesn’t happen for another couple of weeks, but it’s important that everyone knows in advance so they can worry about whether or not they’ll end up sitting next to anybody with whom they have a severe personality clash.

Not that there’s many people who hate each others’ guts on our project team. (Maybe "hate each others’ guts" is too strong - let’s just say "dislike each others’ mannerisms"). While there are always some disagreements and stress in any group of about thirty people who are facing almost continual collective looming deadlines, nobody has, for example, felt strongly enough to code the office layout in Doom. Yet.

Actually, I work with a group of incredibly skilled people, who would never dream of getting into petty squabbles. They use their vast knowledge and teamwork to continually whap deadlines squarely on the head whenever they arise. I learn from and value every hour that I work with these highly experienced professionals. (Yep, some of them will be reading this, did you guess?)

There are important things to consider when Those In Charge decide who sits where. They have to look at who works with whom, who needs extra work space, and who’s been working here the longest and deserves the best view from the window.

As it happens, we’re moving into a larger area, so everybody gets more desk space - that is, more horizontal surfaces on which to scatter papers chaotically. And just about everyone gets glorious views of St Kilda Road ahem oops, St Kilda Boulevard, which seems to be important sometimes, even if you do spend 95% of your time staring into your monitor. And most of the other 5% in meeting rooms with little or no natural light.

(St Kilda Road hasn’t made the big name change yet, but it’ll be soon. It’s all part of a bid by the government to make it sound more impressive. Does Boulevard sound more impressive than Road? Will the name change involve improving the Road itself? I suspect not, apart from new street signs.)

So all looks well for when we move. There’ll be the usual disruption as the mass shift of computers, books, files, office furniture and assorted other junk makes it across the building, but when it’s all over we’ll be in a more spacious, nicer working environment. As a workmate commented, all we’ll need now is a flying fox down to the tram stop on the corner.

See also: Toxic Custard Guide to Life In The Office

Writing letters to relatives can be a chore. It depends on the relative of course, but occasionally you can be stuck for something to say. "What can I mention to Aunt Netty… no, she wouldn’t understand any of that… that would give her a heart attack… and if I mention that she’ll be writing back to let me know her half of the family has disowned me and removed me from all their wills."

And what makes it doubly difficult is when using an Aerogramme. It is a sin (in fact I think it might be the eleventh commandment) not to use all the space in an Aerogramme. You wanna write less, it’s got to be a postcard or you spend the extra money on a real letter with small notepaper, so you don’t have to fill it up.

There is, fortunately, a backup topic that can be used in times of emergencies. Everyone knows it’s only used when you run out of things to write about, but etiquette demands that this is politely ignored.

That topic is the weather. Statistics by the Toxic Faculty of Correspondence indicate that 93% of Aerogrammes sent contain information about the weather. This can vary from a simple "We’ve had a lot of rain recently" that actually serves to spur the author on to a related, bolder, more interesting topic, to a full paragraph that contains every little detail about the amount of rain, the type of rain drops falling, comparing it to last year, other months, other cities, other countries.

So when you’re stuck with another fold of the Aerogramme to go, talk about the weather.

We found out that our local newsagent’s name is Hercules. Just as well, given how bulky the Saturday papers are.

Speaking of Hercules, have you clocked that show about Hercules? I haven’t actually watched it - I think I can tell how awful it is just from watching the commercials.

Okay, so historical (or mythological) accuracy probably isn’t their strong point. But when you can spot a really really big planet-sized historical innaccuracy just from watching the promo, you know something’s going to be wrong. We’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that all the characters were speaking English, with American accents. It’s a fact of life that subtitles are just not fashionable with the commercial TV stations. In fact, they’re not fashionable with anybody except SBS. And so the programme makers tend to make everybody speak English no matter where the show is set. Sometimes they make a token effort to make it a, say, German accent if the character is German. It’s no more realistic, but at least you can get into the mood of the character not being a native English speaker.

So we won’t talk about language.

(As an aside, in non-English-speaking countries, do the shows set in English-speaking countries have the English-speaking characters speaking languages other than English even though they’re supposedly English-speaking? Yes? Fair enough.)

The promo in question, no doubt to tie-in with the Olympic Games, purported to be the story of the original Olympic Games. And Hercules is there, hanging out with the athletes, playing with each others’ javelins etc.

Of course an eagle-eyed viewer such as myself noticed immediately that all the athletes had their clothes on. Maybe it’s not entirely true, but popular belief would have it that the ancient Olympians performed without their dacks on. Okay, so this is a family show, but there are ways and means, most of them involving filming from the waist up, and the rest involving filming from the knee down.

Come to think of it… I won’t claim to know much about the legend of Hercules - if he is ever meant to have attended the Games - or if he even lived in the right century. Probably not. I get the feeling that the script writers of this show probably found themselves throwing in anything they could think of from Ancient Greece.

"Yeah yeah, we’ve got Hercules… and the Olympian Games… how about we throw in Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagorus… yeah, Hercules can rescue them from being crushed by Doric columns… and they all eat olives and hang around the Parthenon…"

An exercise bike has arrived in our house. It sits there in the corner of the room, just daring you to get on and burn some fat. Once you climb on and start pedalling, it lets you know how far and how fast you’d be going if you weren’t going nowhere. It also lets you know how long you’ve been pedalling, and what woeful number of calories you’ve burnt off.

Perhaps we need exercise bikes that more realistically simulate an afternoon ride. Some kind of fan system that blows strong wind into your face, no matter which direction you’re going. An attached quadrophonic sound system to simulate a bunch of no-penises in a souped-up Commodore accelerating past you with the radio up full blast. A sprinkler system to spray you with rain water.

No, what it really needs is a better way of telling you how much you’ve burnt off. Instead of measuring it in calories or kilojoules, how about in terms of chocolate? "You have ridden for three hours and burnt off 4.2 squares of chocolate." That’d keep people pedalling.