Secure Custody Services are commonly known as safety deposit boxes. Today, I was looking for a safety deposit box. Don’t ask why. No idea where to look, so I went into the city and started walking into banks asking if they had that.

“No, but you can try our Box Hill branch, they have some.”
“No, don’t know where you can get some.”
“Last time I went overseas, I went to 99 William St, it’s not a bank just a safety deposit box thingummy-whatsit.”

99 William St is the National Bank. And they don’t have safety deposit boxes.

“No, we don’t, but try our Head Office at 288 Collins St.”

Okay, toddle toddle toddle, 288 Collins St.

“Our Secure Custody Services department is in the basement, catch the lift over there.”

This is more like it! Down to the basement I go, to find a couple of gruff security people behind a desk behind huge steel bars. “Do you have an account with the bank?” No. “Well, you need an account.” Ah.

Well, where do I have an account? Let’s go to the Commonwealth!

Toddle toddle toddle, corner Elizabeth and Bourke Streets.

“Our Secure Custody Services department is in the basement.” (deja vu…) “You’ll need to go up one flight of stairs…” (up!?) “… then catch the lift down to the basement.” (ah.)

Up the stairs, down the lift, looky here, another desk, more humongous steel bars, more security personell. “The smallest size is $95 per year, plus a $60 account setup fee.” how do I access it? “you have a key, and you need ID.” OK. Can someone else access it? “only if you’ve added them, they need to be here and they need 100 points of ID.” well, for various reasons that wasn’t realistic for my purpose, so I left again.

After visiting the secure, barred basements of the Bank of Melbourne and discovering that ANZ was all full up and had a one year waiting list, ditto HSBC (thus saving me the trip to Box Hill), I heard this story from all of them. You need an account, and only you and the people you have personally introduced to the bank manager can access it. Now there’s security for you.

Unfortunately I still don’t have a safety deposit box.

But I haven’t had so much fun in years.

Hmm, haven’t posted for a while so I thought I should just check in briefly to register that I’m still alive.

Had a 21st birthday on the weekend and Monday. That is, the birthday was on Monday, but festivities began on Saturday with a family “do” and continued through till Monday night with dinner and a visit to the Carlton Yacht Club.

So apparently I’m supposed to be an adult now… haven’t quite worked out whether “adult” corresponds to “grown-up”, or if I can get away with ignoring that…

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered gdesklets. Pretty stuff. I’ve replaced my gkrellm with a monitor on the desktop … they’re easier to cover up! And now I have an XMMS thingum in the bottom right corner of the screen, and a weather forecast for 9 days across the bottom. And a GMail checker. And a “Current USA Terror level” thingum that shows John Ashcroft with his face tinged to the current level. Currently it’s yellow, “Exercise vague caution”.

I’ve also bought a 200Gb hard drive which will contain all my backups. Well, right now it does contain the most recent backups, but it will go into an off-site box to get periodic diff updates so that I always have a recent backup of my whole system readily available. Well, systems, because I backed up ockle.org onto that backup disk as well as my PC.

Okay, that’s all I can think of for now.

Ran out of my old pre-ground Grinders coffee this afternoon. Had to grind my own… and I just thought I’d quickly jot down the fact that coffee ground straight into the porta-filter, that is, all of 3 minutes (if that) between beans and espresso cup is YUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Thoughts upon returning from a road trip to Canberra:

1. Roundabouts are evil. Multi-lane roundabouts on a highway are extra evil.
2. Canberra is as far from Lake Boga as it is from Melbourne. Canberra is twice as far from Melbourne as it is from Sydney. Go figure.
3. Water barriers around Parliament House look stupid. They make it look like we’re scared, without actually keeping anyone out.
4. On the topic of Paliament House security: really, what damage am I going to do with a Swiss Card!?
5. Canberra has very nice wineries with very nice wines.
6. Wine tasting is a very nice business. You get your customers drunk so they have less inhibitions, then you flog them the wines they’ve just tasted.
7. 2000km driving makes anything seem like a long time, even just one weekend.
8. Are we there yet?
9. How do you spell that noise that Donkey makes with his lips in a text message?
10. No matter what the menu in the vegan restaurant says, that’s not beef.

    and last but not least…

11. LANE ONE FORM