A LOT of stuff gets thrown around our office.

It isn’t just opinions, or insults. There’s the material stuff, too. And some of it hurts.

Good job too.

You see, some of my co-workers insist on wearing iPods at their desk, and getting through to them is like trying to break the Enigma code.

I’m more likely to get a conversation from King Tutankhamun’s 4,000-year-old corpse than these boys.

A plank of 4x2 might be better company. I’d get more information from the headless mouse left on the doorstep by my cat.

You get the picture.

I couldn’t do it myself. You see, one of the things I love about the newspaper industry is the fact that you hear so many snatches of conversation going on at once.

“What? One of the seven dwarves is missing from the end-of -pier show?”

“A murder, you say?”

“With a putting iron at Queen’s Park Golf Course...”

“I think it was on the Noddy Train...”

“Well, have you asked your local MP?”

“Him? I’ve heard he has a regular back wax...”

“Wearing the latest Herve Leger bandage dress...”

“And as a result the circulation has gone up...”

What an empty day it would be without being privy to these sort of day-to-day titbits. So why my colleagues insist on being “plugged in” for the best part of the day is beyond me.

I shouldn’t have to ask the same question several times in a progressively louder voice, just because someone chooses to isolate themselves from the team.

What has life come to when the only way to get someone’s attention sitting just a couple of desks away is to throw the nearest large object at them.

What lonely lives these people must lead if they don’t and won’t be just a little bit connected to what’s going on around them.

There’s the noise intrusion too with these MP3 players. Last year I took a coach journey from Seattle to Vancouver. I should have remembered the breathtaking mountains and big skies. My lasting recollection is a bloke in the seat in front of me whose gismo was emitting a particularly loud and infuriating tisk, tisk, tisk, tisk, for four solid hours.

On a more serious note, only last month we reported how a woman in her 80s was hit by a cyclist who was wearing headphones.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve all seen cyclists on numerous occasions veering into dangerous territory, oblivious to traffic noise or even the warning sound of a horn.

Hearing is an important sense, and these daft twits who continue to deafen themselves to everything going on around them might as well be riding blindfolded.

I’m not sure what the chaps in our office do when it comes to listening to music while riding in traffic. Let me just ask them...

Hello.

HELLO!

Right. Where’s that Sellotape dispenser?