This evening as I was leaving the office I heard the person next door sneeze. I called out “bless you” loud enough that the sneezer should have been able to hear me. A few seconds later I heard a young woman reply “thank you.”

It made me feel good to give some kindness to a stranger, and even nicer to have them acknowledge it.

I upgraded lambie.org to the latest version of Wordpress today, which was 2.7 Release Candidate 2. Basically, that’s the last release before an official 2.7 package is put out to the public.

A few hours later I hear that 2.7 has been released. Ah well. It only took a few minutes to re-upgrade the software, and now I’m using 2.7. The automatic upgrade looks nice, but doesn’t work on our setup because we don’t allow FTP to our main hosting servers.

Personally, I prefer the admin interface to 2.5, but it’s not a bit issue.

Last night I received an automated email from Virgin Blue’s booking system telling me that they had altered our itinerary and we’d now be flying to Melbourne via Adelaide in December. What? No. There’s a reason why I wanted the 6:15AM direct flight - it means we don’t waste the day sitting in airports! Considering we’re only in the Eastern States for a few days, we can’t afford to be getting in at 5PM on our first day.

So I called Virgin Blue’s customer number, and before I could complain about the attempted switcheroo the lady cut me off and said “… and now they’ve got you going via Timbuktu and you want to change it. Let me see what I can do.”

She gave us back our seats on the original flight and made it sound like in the last 24 hours they’d dropped the flight and then reinstated it. Not likely. I checked the availability of flights last night and you could buy an expensive seat still on the flight we wanted. I think they were just trying to free up some seats on the more popular flight by shifting cheaper fares to alternative, less convenient times.

It’s a somewhat sensible plan, when all of your seats are economy class, yet passengers are paying fares ranging from around $250 all the way up to $849. Our flight currently shows that there’s no $579 or $709 seats available on our plane (which together with with $849 seat are the premium economy choices). We paid about $300 a ticket, so if they move us off the flight onto a less popular option then they can sell our seats as $709 options. Bingo, a cool $800, literally for nothing.

Well it’s not really nothing, because they pissed us off. You can’t really afford to do that to customers, if you want them to still be customers. I bet that there’s a lot of people who would feel intimidated to call customer support and demand their seats back. I wonder if you can even do that, or if Virgin Blue are legally entitled to move you around at their whim. If it hadn’t been a 3 minute call with no obstacles I’d have been annoyed, but because I think I understand their motives and intention, and it doesn’t impact me in the end, I’m not bothered. I even respect their cheekyness, just a little.

I just got back from a trip to Office Works. “How is this interesting?”, I hear you ask. It’s interesting because I love stationery, and I think after almost 28 years on this Earth I’ve only just realised it.

How can someone love stationary you might be wondering, and it’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure, and I don’t claim to be an expert (see above, where I only just realised now my obsession), but I have some ideas.

I think it started at a young age. It always does. I loved to draw, but not in the typical, usual sense. I like to draw with constraint and precision; I liked drawing on grid paper. I had one of those great “keep the kids amused for hours” book that was published in the 60s or 70s. It was full of arts and crafts projects, and I remember one of the activities was replicating some Native American (I think we called ‘em Red Indians back then) and Eskimo designs. The idea was that you’d trace them out onto grid or graph paper - is that the one with the dots? I liked them because they were easily reproducable and didn’t require any extra skill or imagination on my part. There were also block outline drawings of people and objects, like totem poles or tee-pees, and I copied them down furiously. I think I was about 7 or 8 at the time. On reflection, I think these pictures are a 2D representation of what you can create with Lego blocks. Check out some of the Miniland scale designs for examples of what I’m talking about. This might explain my ongoing interest in Lego.

My drawings weren’t limited to copying patterns though, I also liked to create human-styled robots, complete with nonsense technical information. They were the blueprints, you see. Drawing cars or helicopters was another interest. I think this explains my attraction to the first two cars I ever owned (an 83 Toyota Celica coupe, and an 82 Toyota Supra). These cars were clearly designed with only a ruler and grid paper.

I remember doing the grocery shopping with mum and dad at Woolworths in Armadale on a Saturday morning, circa 1988. I’d love spending my pocket money on pads of paper, pencils, rulers and desk tidys (even at a young age I was trying to get my desk organised). The stationery section was near the toy section and they had a great range of GI Joe figures, especially for a supermarket.

With both my grid paper drawings and my Lego construction I’ve always been a follower of rule and order rather than a slave to creativity. I’ve tried, as an adult, to explore free-building with my Lego and see where I go, but I am just not as inspired or driven as other members of the AFOL community. As a child I’d build my own Lego creations but as an adult it’s not as interesting to me. I much prefer to follow instructions and achieve a known outcome rather than branch out on my own and create something entirely new. I wonder why that is.

Today I bought a couple of different pads of graph paper and some new pens. I spent ages trying to decided between the Spirax A4 5mm graph pad and the Spicers Olympic 5mm pad before I figured I’d wasted 10 minutes and should just buy them both. One has green squares and one has blue, so there’s kinda some legitimacy in my deliberation (remember I’m colourblind). OK, you’re right. There’s no legitimacy at all - it’s just paper. But remember, I love stationery.