Wrong number

My phone rang at 2 yesterday afternoon. I'm too cheap to pay $60 a year for caller ID so I answered, in case it was my wife or someone was ringing to tell me I'd won the football pools.

It was neither, it was somebody who wanted Simon Hopkins. I'm not, and never have been, Simon Hopkins, so I told him it was a wrong number.

Usually at this point the caller hangs up (sometimes they apologise first, but really it's no great matter). But not this one. Oh no. He ploughed straight into his script to sell me a credit card loan.

Sisyphean exploits

Today, for no particular reason apart from wanting to create another online identity (it’s not like I have enough already) I registered AnotherSisyphus on Twitter. I imagine I’ll be happy with only ever updating this with “Rolling a stone up a hill” once a day.

Hanging on the telephone

Today started much too early, with a 5:30am conference call. That would have been bad enough by itself, but when it was cancelled at 5:40am I was put into a really black mood. I went back to sleep until an alarm woke me for my next conference call, at 6:30am. And that one was cancelled too.

Grunt work

Tonight I went to the gym, for the first time since I tried training to prepare for Chiang Mai, at the end of March. (What a waste of time that was; instead of lifting heavy weights, it would have been more appropriate to practise falling onto sharp rocks. Oh well, hindsight is 20-20.)

Toilet encounter

I went to the toilet this afternoon. Not such an exciting thing to remark upon, but in one of the cubicles there was a man on the phone, shouting rather loudly. To begin with I thought he was shouting at me, but it's unlike the men of Hong Kong to be so territorial about toilet spaces.

Cough it up

I've been feeling sicker and sicker every day this week. To begin with I blamed my sore throat on inhaling fumes at the weekend. I'm not sure how I would have subjected myself to breathing in lots of pollution while bobbing up and down on a boat miles from Hong Kong, but you never know, do you?