Sometimes working from home is great. You make yourself a coffee, you wear your PJs until you feel like it, you have access to whatever weird thing you think you might suddenly need (a quote from a favourite book, some notes you wrote for another script nine years ago that might provide a clue, a big furry jumper to put on over your PJs).

But...

The telemarketers call me at home. My telemarketers are very nice people from India, who are always deeply thrilled that I have won the special once in a lifetime chance to sign up for eight years with a mobile phone carrier I have never heard of.

However, when you get up from the middle of a writing reverie and you stumble across the room towards the telephone and hear that telltale gap before anyone speaks, you really don't appreciate the tone of voice that the telemarketers take when they ask, "Is that Mrs Clarke?"

I have told them on many occasions that Mrs Clarke is not my name. I am not married to a member of my family, or coincidentally married to another person called Clarke who also spells it with an "e" on the end. I have told them also that I do not wish to speak to them, that this is a work number, and that the police are tracing the call because they are illegally not telling me where they got my phone number from. (Naturally, this last one is not true but it does tend to scare them).

Most of you have hopefully already heard this brilliant telemarketing prank. If you haven't, please do yourself a favour and have a listen. It's possibly the only way to get a telemarketer to give out his address over the telephone.

Not all of us can manage that, though.

So here is my advice: sing.

Now, whenever the phone rings in the middle of the morning, as I walk towards it I think of a song I know the words to (Ben Folds, Ani Difranco, even a bit of "Did you Ever Know That You're My Hero") and when I hear the Indian telemarketer asking can he please speak to Mrs Clarke, I sing. Loudly. As out of tune as possible.

After maybe a couple of verses, or up to the point where I can't remember the lyrics, I stop and I hang up the phone. Listening to the reaction at the other end of the phone is especially fun. I'm hoping they have to tick some kind of box such as "CUSTOMER HUNG UP" or "CUSTOMER NOT HOME" or "CUSTOMER ABUSIVE". I am hoping they have to make a new box called "CUSTOMER APPEARS TO BE SINGING".

Anyone who gets the same calls, try it. We shall overcome.

I was at university for six and a half years. I studied a variety of things, from the Australian Constitution to the formulation of a social jurisprudence in the Bridget Jones books.

While studying at the university, I honed one skill in particular. I became very good at working to deadlines. I can feel a deadline. I can sense it. At the start of the semester, I would write down the deadlines in my new diary with my new pen and I would know when they were and I was certain that this year I would start studying, researching, or writing several weeks before the due date.

There's a scene in the upcoming movie Happy Feet, which a group of us saw yesterday at a charity screening, where a penguin is terrified of jumping off a cliff. "It's okay", he says to himself, "Trick yourself". Then, teetering on the edge of the cliff face, he shouts "Look over there!" at which point he looks backwards while walking forwards, saying "Where?" and topples over the cliff.

The joke is funny because you can't trick yourself. You can't tell yourself the deadline for your essay is two weeks earlier than it actually is. You can't tell yourself the exam isn't on the 30th, it's on the third. You get really good at knowing how long you're going to need and you leave it until then. Then you research and practice and study and write and then on the Friday of the due date you submit your work and you go to the pub and by Monday you don't remember a single thing about the entire subject matter you've been learning about for the last six months.

So I've been trained like this - the bad habits of a tertiary education often come in the form of caffeine and nicotine, but in my case it's definitely an inability to work without a deadline, and a habit of leaving everything up to the last minute.

The Comedy Festival is in April. In university lingo, that's getting close to the time where you ask for an extension.

Better get myself down to the library.

Also, why is this conversation happening? (Or in the stupendously irritating Age)? I know why. It's because these kinds of people are so loathed and detested by women with any self regard whatsoever that they don't actually know any, which is sad because there is no better feeling than laughing tea out of your nose because your friends are the funniest people on earth. For the record, two of the top three funniest people I know are women, and the other one is frankly just an unfortunate product of genetics.

So I've been missing from the real (and the virtual) world lately. I've been writing something. With the four fingers on my left hand. It's a slow process, I admit, but it's no slower than writing by candle light in the eighteenth century, so complaineth me not.

Meanwhile, Rita has been marooned in Ararat, where "can I please have a salad sandwich" gets you a white bread roll with cheese, tomato and ham, and the "vegetarian option" on the film catering menu turns out to be bacon quiche.

Cut back to me in the city during my day job listening to city traders discussing how much it would cost to install snow machines up the top of Little Bourke Street so that people could toboggan down the hill from Queen Street to Elizabeth Street during breaks in their Christmas shopping (apparently nobody wants to pay the insurance bill, more's the pity).

Working in the city also meant that I last week witnessed one of the "Melbourne Conversations". A rhetorically broad topic with vastly different speakers including the very hilarious and ever so slightly clever Barry Jones and a naughty Dorothy Porter, who wrote one of my favourite books and who read a beautiful poem (not her own). The next day, one of the other speakers, Alex Miller (crush city) was having a coffee in the cafe I was in and I became breathless and self-daring and had fantasised many witty exchanges but when I looked up he had been replaced by a spotty boy in a stripy T-shirt with a Tintin tuft of bed hair.

Meanwhile, a toast tonight to absent friends. To the friend who wants me to keep January free because she might get married: you're on. It's cancelled. Whole month. Disappeared. To the friend who wrote me a funny, meandering, perfectly descriptive novel in the form of an email and who I haven't seen since 1999: I owe you one, just quietly. To Nick: fly home and keep the money. We'll doctor up some photos. And to Rita in Ararat: I hope they don't read this and give you vegetarian sandwiches made of Ox tongue.

Got to go. This took longer than candle light. Definitely longer than candle light.

Today, in my Day Job, I was asked to tell the people printing my business cards what I would like my title to be. My title. On my business card. Under my name. I was asked to tell them what I would "like" my title to be. Over the phone.

I was thinking, I could say anything, and they would print maybe five hundred or a thousand business cards reading "bad dancer" or "poo liason officer" or "Madam Lady President" or whatever and I could claim that it was a bad phone line, right?

Meanwhile, I haven't made it to the Melbourne Festival again because working for someone else requires, you know, working until you're exhausted and want to go home and watch episodes of things Aaron Sorkin wrote and that you wish you could have the time to write but you can't because you're watching Aaron Sorkin.

When you write, it's sitting down and getting yourself into the headspace that is actually the most difficult part. Many writers obviously don't bother to do this, which I know because I read The Age online in the mornings. The Age online has a system for posting their stories. First, they post a version riddled with mistakes, typos, spelling errors, repeated paragraphs, and incomplete headlines. Then, four or five hours later, they replace these mistakes. Often with new mistakes.

It's fun for a pedant like me to watch. The other day, there was a headline that said "Vizard Account Found Alive".

Presumably this newsworthy discovery was made at about the same time Vizard's accountant was found alive, but I only know that because the Herald Sun has better sub-editors.

Anyway, the point of this is that this is an article about my favourite film reviewer, Anthony Lane, who writes like a dream and who makes me laugh even if I'm reading about The Lord of the Rings, and reading about the Lord of the Rings usually makes me want to scratch my skin off.

The article is about writing. Lane doesn't allow himself a cup of tea until TWO PARAGRAPHS IN to whatever it is he's writing. This terrifies both me and (presumably) the extended family of Earl Grey. Nevertheless, this is an interesting article and also highlights how excellent The New Yorker is. The fact-checkers can pull an article out of an issue on the basis that a comma is missing.

Imagine if The Age had standards like that. Possibly Vizard's account would still not be found.

My boyfriend's back. Yay internet. How I missed you.

Since not having the internet at home, I have done the following:

1. Cleaned (nay, scrubbed) the bathroom.
2. Cleaned and organised and recategorised everything in my bedroom/office.
3. Done the gardening.
4. Carefully followed the instructions on the hard rubbish collection notice, rather than sneaking out on the night before the collection and stuffing unauthorised materials into other people's neatly presented bundles of twigs and broken desk chairs.
5. Read half of John Banville's book and finished Alan Bennett's.
6. Enjoyed the sunshine, including a rather comical attempt at swimming laps this afternoon (was there ever a Mr Bean episode involving an effort on his part to get fit? If not, there should have been. So much potential in lane ropes, sullen pool attendants, surprising changeroom encounters etc).
7. Almost entirely finished a first draft of something.

Of course, my social life and knowledge of the outside world have both rather collapsed, but it could be said that the former of these wasn't particularly robust to begin with, and the latter was bordering on obsessive. It is therefore with every good intention that I hereby declare I shall only use the internet when I need it.

Possibly doing a YouTube search of "funny animals" qualifies. Perhaps it doesn't. I'll be the judge of that.

Today, my wireless internet died, my phone credit ran out, and the key to my house went missing so I couldn't leave for so much as a cup of coffee in the sunshine.

Essentially, I was locked inside the house and unable to contact anyone in any way except possibly morse code, which I couldn't learn because I didn't have the internet.

I got so much work done.

Someone has GOT to fix this untenable situation.