I found a teensy snippet of the train ticket I lost on Monday. It was in the washing machine, which is now working since J.E.H. (aka Mr Hoover) came and again removed the obstruction (1x kids’ sock) from the pump.

I have already sent away my grovelling form for a ticket replacement, but I’ll hold onto the snippet as evidence for when they come back in reply, denying me a refund.

This morning at work some guy waltzed into the office and sat down at a spare desk with his laptop computer. I had no idea who he was, but one of the others I rarely speak to seemed to know. No matter. From time to time they get extra people in here to do stuff. I don’t know what most of them do - spend the project’s money I suppose. But I’m only in there half the time, so I wouldn’t really say I have my finger on the pulse.

Anyway a little while later, his mobile phone rang. And rang. I looked around. He had gone into a nearby meeting room. There was nobody else in there with him, so I presume he wanted some peace and quiet. Maybe to shelter from people’s mobiles ringing. Grrr.

Now let’s get this clear. A mobile phone is mobile. It’s meant to be carried with you. There’s no point having it if you’re going to leave it on a desk all the time while you’re elsewhere. If you don’t want to answer it, turn it off or switch it to being silent, so the rest of us don’t have to have our quiet compromised.

So I went and pressed the button to reject the call, then turned it off, and left a Post-It note saying I’d done so. I am so damn sick of people doing that.

He didn’t leave it on his desk for the rest of the day!

My washing machine is playing up again. Last time it turned out to be a kid’s sock stuck in the pump. I suspect the same this time around. Damn. I managed to get a load of laundry done in it last night anyway, but… well, more of that later.

Last night a storm-and-a-half raged across the city. It hit my neck of the woods around 10pm. Although there was barely any rain, the wind more than made up for it. I swear at one point I was thinking of Dorothy’s house blowing away in the Wizard of Oz at one point.

A bit after 11pm, I was just about to go to bed, when I thought hey… the computers are still on. I’ll go turn them off in case there’s a blackout, so they shut down gracefully. So, stroll over to computers. Start shutting down… Ka-chunk, they start doing it…

Click. Blackness. No power. Blackout. D’oh! I scrambled for a torch. Wait! Power again! Literally only for a second though, then it was gone again. I turned everything off at the mains, then retired to bed. The power was back in the morning thankfully.

This morning I was looking for my monthly train ticket. I bought it yesterday. I couldn’t find it. Then it dawned on me. Probably still in my shirt pocket. My shirt pocket which is attached to my shirt. Which having worn yesterday, I put in the wash last night. That’s right, a brand spanking new $83 train ticket, washed away.

Damn. So I’ve got hold of a form for getting a refund on the ticket. Commonsense says it should be too hard, since I bought it with a card, and therefore have proof of payment. However, commonsense may not come into play here, as the ticketing company have a reputation which leads me to believe it may be easier to get blood from a stone.

The form doesn’t have a category for "lost ticket". They do have one for "mutilated ticket", but incredibly it requires that the ticket be presented and readable (either by sight or electronically). Hell, how likely is it to be readable if it’s been mutilated?! They also have a category for "special consideration" which presumably covers everything else. But I’ll see what little bits of the ticket I can recover to put in with my claim. Nothing readable, I’m betting.

Oh well, worth a try.

I had a couple of dreams over the weekend. It’s relatively unusual for me to remember the dreams I have, so here’s what I recall…

Saturday night: I dreamt that I could see Leon and Claudia, the two cops from Lantana (which I watched on Saturday). They were undercover, pretending to be taxi drivers. I don’t know why they thought they were undercover, given there were two of them in the taxi… what’s more the taxi wasn’t really a taxi, it was a convertible car, with the roof down.

It was evening (presumably warm and not raining) and they were driving around Elsternwick, trying to see if they could pick up an armed robber coming out of a restaurant. This may have been influenced by a high-profile court case going on at the moment.

Anyway Leon and Claudia at one stage went into one of the restaurants. The walls were covered in framed pictures of female breasts. And I think someone walked past with a trolley full of breasts… either sculpted out of clay, or real ones (but not in a gory sense). Very bizarre. Leon and Claudia spoke to someone who was apparently a robber and, in reference to the breasts, remarked to him that "you must love it here".

Sunday night: I dreamt I changed jobs. I went to work at a place in Prahran, something to do with a discount clothing shop - like the old Coles variety store in Prahran used to be before they turned it into a supermarket - to get to the job, I had to go through the shop and up some escalators at the back. Why they would have a software development house at the back of a discount shop I don’t know, but working there were Josh, Cathy, and a bloke I’ve met a couple of times while in my current job, Doug.

For some reason I was having enormous trouble getting to this place on the first day. I detoured via the city, then found myself waiting in the middle of Dandenong Road for a tram which would be going in the wrong direction. Down the road I could see people dodging 4 lanes of traffic to get to the previous tram stop - unlike this one, for some reason there was no pedestrian bridge. I made a note to rant to Vaughan
about it.

Josh came and showed me where to catch a 78
to the right place (something I should have known already), then he took me up into the office. We got up there and it was ergonomic hell, like something out of Brazil, lots of strangely shaped desks, tiny screens and awkwardly placed keyboards. Doug was there, playing computer games.

What does it all mean? No idea.

• A previous dream (22 May 2002)

• Another previous dream (16 Nov 2001)