Note: these fluffy toys are stunt doubles

At work, the electronic lock to open the door from the lift lobby is at about waist height, and operated by a card key. Some people have the key dangling around their neck, and bend down to get the key to touch the lock. Fair enough.

But some people leave them attached to their belt (near the front) by a clip, and open the door by moving their waist next to the lock to get the card key to touch it. Which, frankly, looks rather bizarre, and a little disturbing.

I find it amusing how many fluffy toys make it into the workplace. Some people (particularly women) that you might think are hard-bitten ruthless business types can still have a row of teddy bears lined up on the shelf above their desks, and no one bats an eyelid. In one colleague’s case, there is a row of half a dozen small ceramic animals of various types along the top of the computer monitor, waving a constant welcome to her whenever she sits down.

Yonder by the window another person’s desk is replete with fluffy toys - a floppy-eared rabbit, a gorilla and two bears, sitting close to pictures of family, corporate training certificates and long service awards.

It would be a laugh to get a clipboard one day, go around and do a fluffy toy audit of the building.

Blokes’ desks seem much more utilitarian: some have the pictures and certificates and awards, but mostly just a plethora of papers, with maybe a messy coffee cup thrown in for good measure.

In fact, maybe it’s time I tidied my desk.

My mobile phone has rung so much in the last few days that I’m starting to imagine I’m hearing it. Not particularly helped by the following:

As I stepped into the toilet this morning, I must have been momentarily distracted, and as I turned around to close the door, my forehead and the high shelf in there collided - BANG! - leaving me with a bump on the head. Triffic. Thankfully it’s up near my hair line, so not excessively noticeable (though I am not in front of a mirror right now, so for all I know it’s gone blue without me knowing).

A long time school friend’s mum died of cancer on Thursday. Such a horrible thing for their family, all I can do is pass on condolences from my family.

Film crew blocking off Hardware Street on Saturday, making me more late for lunch than I had previously been. Crowd control consisted of a woman in a safety vest dragging on a cigarette, not even pretending to be interested. "What are they filming?" "Oh it’s a short film." "What’s it about?" "Dunno." Judging from the costumes, it appeared to be set in the 1940s, but who knows.

Mowed some of the lawn on Sunday. Bloody lawn. Why’s it have to grow so fast? No time for niceties, so ruthlessly chopped down all the daisies, decorative though they looked. Beginning to see the appeal of covering the lot in concrete. Or Astro-Turf.

The latest bombardments of spam seem to include something about someone called "Par1s H1lt0n". Haven’t investigated as I don’t read spam, and aren’t about to start.

Bloke walking down the street from the station this morning, waving a long umbrella around like a baton, switching it from hand to hand at random, oblivious to the rest of the hordes around him trying to hurry to work. Hope it didn’t have a poison tip. Obviously a frustrated marching band member.

Met up with a TV reporter on Spring Street, and after chatting to him a dishevelled bloke (who looked like a combination of Michael Moore and one of Michael Palin’s Monty Python tramps) buttonholed him and said he (the reporter) should do a story about how he (the bloke) had been responsible for the break-up of The Beatles. Uh huh.

Yeah, smash the state! Victory for hax0rs! Let’s vandalise Daniel’s diary on a Sunday morning!

Turned out to be an ISP-wide problem. Full credit to them though, they’re making amends by offering an upgrade to people’s accounts. So there you go.

Thanks to Tony, who notified me first (and the others who let me know - you know who you are).

PS. Happy birthday, Doctor.

PPS. I reckon those Vegemite In A Biskit things must be genetically modified. How else could they do it?

With many thanks to friends who couldn’t use the tickets, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Some familiar faces (oh look, the Spanish Enfanta as the medium…), some intriguing special effects (how did they make that stuff fly around the room?), great dialogue and acting. A lot of fun.

Is this a world record? The first Christmas card for this year arrived on Monday, from one of my English uncles. I know they’ve had a postal strike recently there - maybe he was greatly concerned that if he didn’t get it into the post now, they’d call a snap strike and he wouldn’t be able to get the card to me on time. It could spell disaster, of course. Western civilisation could easily fall if Christmas cards couldn’t be delivered. So fair enough.

Despite my hatred of promotion of Christmas before December, I have actually done some of my Christmas shopping already. ‘Cos you’ve got to take advantage of the pre-Christmas rush sales when you can. Most of the kiddy Christmas gifts are taken care of. The kids and my young cousin Luke are getting Lego, every one of them. One of the sets is so damn cool I wouldn’t mind it for myself, but I’ll just have to be content with offering building assistance. (And maybe playing with it when they’re not here.)

At some stage in the next few weeks I’d better buy a batch of cards and start working my way through the address book and getting them into the post, with the overseas people first in the queue. And then comes the tricky bit - the presents for the adults. I may seem organised, getting started early like this, but I’m bound to be dashing around in a mad panic the week before Christmas, figuratively and literally wrapping things up.

It has come to my attention that there is someone I know, someone who is a Gen-Xer like myself, who… and I’m not sure there’s any easy way to say this,does not have a mobile phone.

There. I’ve blurted it out. Now I’m not going to reveal who this person is, because they have made a conscious decision not to have one, and naming them publicly might lead not only to ridicule, but to every phone company in the known universe bombarding them with sales pitches.

At the other end of the mobile telephony adoption scale, I’m working with a bunch of guys who live, breathe and sell mobile phones for a living. They haven’t even got land lines on their desks. They wander around the office, super-charged latest model mobiles at the ready, with polyphonic ring tones that have taken another step towards sounding like real music, in-built cameras (now up to a resolution which is actually usable) - and wow, they even make phone calls!

My own phone is an aging Nokia 6210, almost three years old. Egad! Three years! Ancient! Yet it’s quite light and slim and SOMEHOW, despite its age, still works well. Well okay, the battery used to slip around a bit, but that was fixed by shoving a piece of folded paper into the back of it. The main problem is the leather case I have studiously kept it in over these years is starting to fall apart.

I suspect leather phone cases are becoming pass� now anyway. Compared to the pleasing aesthetic qualities of the phone itself, the leather case is uhh, utilitarian - practical, but not pretty. So I’ve ditched the case. My phone is now naked, my only problem now being that I have to remember to put it in my pocket (preferably a pocket without coins or keys in it to scratch it up) when I go walkabout, rather than being able to leave it hanging on my belt. After all, I have ranted a lot in the past about people who leave their mobiles on their desks, resulting in annoying rings disturbing others (particularly me). So leaving it on my desk is a habit I hope to avoid.

But the question is, should I stick with my faithful old workhorse, or ruthlessly send it off to the glue factory (or whatever the equivalent is for mobile phones), and upgrade? Especially if I can wangle a free upgrade on my current phone contract? Well, perhaps I’ll take a close look at the Christmas phone catalogues, and see if anything takes my fancy.

Things I discovered when giving blood on Thursday:

• weight 70kg, which is down a couple of kilos, though I don’t feel any thinner. I may use it as an excuse to eat more chocolate
• haemoglobin count is 16.5 (dunno what it’s measured in, but whatever it is, there’s 16.5 of them, hooray for all of them)
• my blood pressure is 120 over 80, apparently not too shabby
• I can pump out blood at 55ml/second minute (per arm, I assume)