I went to buy a phone the other day. I thought a nice spanking new caller ID phone would be just the ticket for helping to dodge telemarketers while I try and decide if I’m going to get a new phone number and a silent line. So I popped into Dick Smith and looked at phones. A nice Panasonic set caught my eye - a desk phone and a cordless phone in one package. Dick Smith Man saw me looking at it and strolled over to try and convince me to buy it.

He worked hard at it, too. Maybe it was my non-committal expression that spurred him on. It was a little like that scene in the Life Of Brian where the market stall guy insists that Brian should haggle. Dick Smith Man started haggling - he talked himself down from the initial price $288. First he said he could get me a discount. I said how much of a discount. He said how much did I expect to pay. Although I had no specific amount of money in mind, and would happy buy it at the full price if it suited my needs, I said I was thinking of around $250. He said it had been on sale the week before, but not quite that cheaply, and that he’d have to check with his manager, and that if I really wanted to buy it today, he’d go ask. I said do that.

While Dick Smith Man went off to see Dick Smith Manager, I wandered around the software section. He came back and said the Manager wasn’t happy (did I ask
for him to be happy?) but that they could do it for $250. Okay. Then I cheered him up by buying a copy of MYOB as well, and not asking for a discount on it.

I got home, and later that night, fiddled with the phone. Then I realised that it was not really going to meet my particular requirements, because unfortunately one of my requirements is that the desk phone - which doubles as the base station for the cordless phone - needs to sit on my desk. In a space on my desk. In a space on my desk which is surrounded by a wall, two computers and a metal filing cabinet. I suspected that the reception would be crap, and indeed it was crap. Shame, because the phones were gorgeous.

Dick Smith Man seemed a little disappointed when I went back to return it the next day. I did decide to take a digital answering machine instead, but it has still left me looking around for a caller ID equipped desktop phone. Shame most of them look so shonky. But wait… the Panasonic one, which looks okay and well built (I’ve never had problems with Panasonic stuff… not like Sharp)… and it has an LCD display on the front of it… amazingly, it doesn’t do caller ID! Fools! What on earth were they thinking?

A great weekend. Got down to Lorne on the Great Ocean Road. Worries that the B&B I’d chosen would turn out to be some kind of Fawlty Towers-type establishment - they were very keen to see us check-in by 9pm, to the extent of ringing at 8:30pm to make sure we were almost there - were unfounded. Driving down the GOR in the dark is a bit of an adventure in itself, and the number of twists and turns left me a little dizzy by the time we got there.

Saturday went for a walk at Erskine Falls downstream along the river. There were a lot of other people around (including some with an initial resemblance toKath & Kim), and a little rain, but it was just enough to keep it scenic and atmospheric, and not so wet that it was miserable. After lunch closer to civilisation, a drive along the GOR then up along a deserted bush track with plenty of mud to splatter over the car and make me happy I hadn’t just washed it.

Sunday drove slowly back to Melbourne, stopping wherever things looked interesting - Airey’s Inlet (love a good lighthouse), Bell’s Beach, Torquay.

My listing in the phone book used to be wrong. I used to be in there as Daniel Bowden. So I got them to change it, to put my correct surname. Big mistake.

You see, nobody who knows me ever looks me up in the phone book. Why would they? They already know me. But telemarketers do. And it used to be a big advantage to pick up the phone and know instantly it was a call I didn’t want to take, when people who say "Hello… Is that Mr Bowden?"

So, how to avoid telemarketers now? Well, I joined the Australian Direct Marketing Association "do not call" list, which has helped quite a bit. But it’s obvious that a lot of the companies ringing around are not ADMA members. And speaking to one of them, they admitted simply getting my number out of the phone book.

Stupidly, it costs money every month to have a silent line. So I’m going to see if I can get the White Pages to go back to listing my name with the name listed incorrectly. And with the money saved from not having a silent line, I think I might perhaps get Caller ID. Or I suppose I could just get the silent line. Hmmmm.

The Hard Word. Very funny, plenty of great dialogue, some action too. A bit like a Guy Ritchie film, but not as desperately groovy and surreal. Very very enjoyable.

The scar looks much better, though it’s still a little scary. The surgeon dude will be taking the stitches out on Wednesday. Until then, I’m keeping a bandage stuck on over it - those stitches look freaky.

The monitor is still operating flawlessly. The washing machine isn’t, but Mr Hoover will be coming over on Tuesday to have a look at it. It will be interesting to see what he thinks of the rather interesting bathroom laundry design I am lumbered with, which makes looking at anything other than the front of the machine into an exercise requiring a degree in physics and Olympic weightlifting ability.

Wow. The monitor works. It really works. I can’t tell you how relieved I am.

And some more good news. But first of all, rewind a bit. A few months ago I noticed a lump on my chest. Not a third nipple, a distinct lump. Eventually I wandered in to see my local GP about it. He said it was almost certainly a benign lymphoma, a kind of tumour of fat, growing just below the skin. Delightful stuff. Nothing to worry about, he said, but suggested I go see a surgeon dude to confirm it, and maybe get it cut out.

So, avoiding telling my mother and making her panic (and thus avoiding mentioning it online, since she occasionally reads what I write here), I went along to see the surgeon dude yesterday. I was completely calm about it, right until the point I was driving over to Cabrini
to see him. Then I started to worry about what he might find.

The bandage covering the scar, which no doubt helps me look windswept and interesting.

Anyway, he was very nice, and confirmed what my GP had told me. Then he said that it might grow, and would I like it cut out on the spot, under local anaesthetic? It would be fairly simple to do, only take fifteen minutes or so, and would avoid complications if it ballooned later into some kind of huge lumpyAlienesque thing growing out of my chest.

Well, I thought, no time like the present. So I said yes and lay down. Then I started to regret it, firstly as he shaved away some of my chest hair, then dobbed antiseptic all over it. Then he did something, and nipped off to get some equipment. I looked down. He’d put a texta mark where he’d need to cut. Ugh. All a bit clinical. I made a mental note not to look at it again.

Then he did something else, and nipped out again. I looked down again. Now the lump was bulging out. Double ugh. I made another mental note, to reinforce the remarks in first mental note, and indeed demand to know why I had ignored the first mental note, when it was quite clear that I shouldn’t have looked again.

I didn’t look again. The anaesthetic took effect and I didn’t feel anything as he took it out, except a downward pressure when (I think) he squeezed it out through the hole he’d cut. Ewwww. Then he stitched me up.

Afterwards, he showed it to me in its jar. Eugh. A lump of fat. He sent it off to pathology anyway. I was so glad it was harmless and gone that I immediately went and told my mother about it.

Latest in the power saga… the power company got back to me to say that during their monitoring, the power had not exceeded the Australian standard (of 254 volts). And interestingly, I found a snippet on a web site that said my long-suffering monitor should work fine up to 264 volts.

So I took it to another monitor repair place last week. A day later they rang to say it was ready. In fact, they rang again this morning. I’m impressed with this mob. Unlike the others, who claimed to have rung, they never actually did. These guys however, have rung twice. Hopefully they’ve actually fixed it too. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Of course, it would be too easy if my appliance hassles magically went away. So yesterday, the washing machine
started playing up. Not draining water out properly. I did various fiddling with the front of it during the day, then after poring through the manual and asking whoever looked like they might know about such things for advice, tried to get round the back where the pipes and things are. More fiddling ensued, until I found a pipe I wanted to take off and fiddle with, but couldn’t. Too tightly attached. Ah, just get a wide adjustable spanner thingy. Oh. No spanner thingy.

Did I ever actually have a spanner thingy? I don’t recall. Since I had to do some supermarket shopping anyway, I went out to the much-bigger-but-further-than-my-usual-supermarket Coles, on the off chance that they might have one. They didn’t. And they didn’t have a bunch of other stuff I wanted. Either that or I couldn’t find it, which is possible. So I ended up stopping past my usual Safeway
supermarket too.

So I got back home, and still no spanner. It was around 10:30pm, but I really wanted to try and solve the washing machine mystery that night. So I got back in the car and headed to Southland K-Mart, one of the few that are open 24 hours a day. Very handy at times like these, when you simply must have a spanner. Indeed, they had the very thing, and obviously the gods were smiling on me for making such an effort to find one so late at night, because when I got to the cash register I discovered it was 20% off.

Back home again, and I discovered that the fiddling with the spanner didn’t actually make a lot of difference. Maybe the gods weren’t smiling at me after all, maybe they were pointing and laughing. But I did a lot more fiddling, and eventually got the water out of the machine and the clothes rinsed and spin-dried. It was definitely bedtime by that point. Hopefully next time I go to use it, it’ll behave itself a bit better.

10pm update: It didn’t.