I lost my PDA/phone on Friday – I only realised at the end of a furniture shopping tour of Ikea, DFS and Ilva. In that time, I laid down on countless of beds, sat in chairs and sofa, inspected shelves and book cases.

It could be anywhere. I dreaded I lost it in Ikea rather than Ilva. Ilva is a Danish furniture company new to the UK, its first store opened here in Gateshead as a direct rival to Ikea and to emphasise the point, they are located directly opposite Ikea. It certainly seem a posher shop of the two.

Trying to find a phone in a furniture shop as big as Ikea bustling full of customers is like trying to find a needle in a haystack in a F5 tornado.

Monday – the phone rang – Ilva’s cleaners had found the phone down the back of a sofa! I’m glad they were honest enough to hand it in as it is worth a bob or two.

I wonder how many more unplanned paid leave I will get before I go back to Libya to work. My dad’s 60th is coming up soon and I’ve made it clear from the outset that I need to have time off for this.

It looks as though rather than make two trips in one week, I might as well get another few more weeks off, and return in April, nearly four months after I returned to the UK for a three-week leave.

My only worry is will I remember how to work again? Will I get a culture shock that work involves not sleeping beyond 11am and haggling for some company vehicles on a daily basis?

I don’t like it when people answer a question with a question… except when I do it…

What is it like to be hearing?

One of the last things I did in Holland before I left was to prepare to leave a train. For most people, this is one of the most beign things that could happen.

Not so with me.

You see, I was leaving Holland to move back to the UK in preparation for my new job. This meant I had a bit of luggage with me – a big purple bag weighing around 20kgs (44lbs), a small bag weighing around 15kgs (33lbs) and my hand luggage which weighed around 14 kgs (30lbs).

Now, you can picture me struggling to get out of my seat, drag all my bags, and these trains has a wee door that’s barely the width of my widening waistline – never mind my bulky kit. In trying to get through (with no help from anyone), my hand luggage – containing hard back books (the heaviest stuff) – fell off my shoulder and hit a woman who was sitting by the door – right on her left boob. That got to hurt. A lot.

I didn’t apologise. I was really struggling, and I did notice she was pretending not to see me so she didn’t have to open the door for me, which would have been a great help. So, in Kyle’s mind – serves you bloody right!

I had a PDA (an O2 XDA IIi) but this summer, the screen cracked for no apparent reason during a 5-minute walk. As it is a touch-sensitive screen, it was rendered totally useless. This was the day before I was due to move to Zuid Holland.

So I used my mum’s old phone, one of those tiny Samsung sliding one – E800 SGH. Well that stopped working on the Journey to London but then it reworked itself again that evening.

Well, it’s broken again, same fault, but it won’t rectify itself. So I had an even older phone, almost a brick – a Nokia 3300 – a relic of the millennium.

So I start charging it up all day… or so I thought. Instead of charging up, it decided to overheat. Luckily I caught it at the end of the day before bedtime, the phone was like a hot potato, quickly took it outside onto the patio, took out the battery as quickly and carefully as I can and left it there, making sure nothing around it can catch fire if it decided to spontaneously cremate itself.

So, I have no phone to text my friends and family at home in the UK and can’t telephone them because I’m too deaf to use a phone (and since I never use a phone, I never remember any telephone numbers). Thank god for email and MSN Messenger.

I sat opposite another table, and I could see two women and three men at that table, in smart suits – nothing about them caught my attention for any particular reason other than that they were in my natural angle of view from where I sat.

One of the women suddenly coughed really hard – only once and without warning – like a reflex action – in the process she spluttered out some half-digested food and it flew onto a man facing opposite her, who I presume is her colleague. All over his black suit, tie and shirt. I couldn’t watch any more.

How embarassing it must have been for her. Glad it hasn’t happened to me… yet.

I’ve been reading a book by Tom Reynolds – Blood Sweat and Tea. Tom is an EMT for the London Ambulance Service, and he has a very popular blog called Random Acts of Reality. The book is essentially a reprint of his blog with a couple of DVD-style extras (his words). All the same, its much nicer in a book than on a website – call me old fashioned.

Anyway, what has this got to do with me scaring the commuters? Well, commuters can be nosey, and tend to read what your reading, especially if you’re laughing at the book. Now, the problem is, the book is like a series of very short films – some chapters are barely a paragraph long. So I might be reading a hilarious one, followed by a really shocking event involving poor kids. So, inevitably, they see the sad parts and then think I’m weird and a space forms around me – or if I’m sitting down, a seat becomes vacant as if I farted.

Which is a good thing, because I hate crowds, even more so on a cramped tram in rush hour – it’s good to get some breathing space so I can laugh properly at the funny bits. Thank god I’m in a very liberal country (Netherlands) or I’d be arrested (UK for example).

Everyone suffers from this. You got some sort of deadline looming – everything goes swimmingly well until an unexpected thing happen.

At work, I have been working on a project for three months, and today, I noticed one of the entries in the database for the project got corrupted. A lot of time wasted now and even more time to redo it.

If that was bad enough, I tried to delete the corrupt entry so I can create a fresh one of the same name, when I accidentally deleted the one right next to it.

Wham! Another entry gone. Yes we do have backups, but to restore the last backup would step my project back more than re-doing it all over again.

At least that’s all it happened on Friday 13th.

Whilst walking home from work one day, I was minding my own business, on a city path when I felt my foot hit something hard and small.

A small stone went flying away from my foot, right in the direction of a wee toddler, hit his little designer trainers that probably cost more than my coat, bounced up and hit his chin.

Luckily the mum never saw me kicking the stone, and I quickly walked past whilst the mum attended to her crying toddler with a sore chin and the evidence lying conspiciously on the ground.