Illegible demand for legibility
OUR item expressing suspicion that the UK Royal Mail is deliberately smudging the printing on its “write the postcode clearly” messages (18 February) reminded Howard Greenwood that he once received a piece of homework marked by his physics teacher bearing an unreadable scrawl in the usual red ink.
Howard took his homework book up to the teacher and asked him what his comment said. The teacher looked at the page and exploded, sending Howard back to his desk with grave threats of what would happen if he were to be so impertinent in future.
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Howard was completely bewildered until, after much deciphering, he and his friends worked out that the scrawl said, “You must write more legibly”.
Life at an end for University of Bath?
THE University of Bath, UK, provides an “email for life” service to alumni, Danny Colyer tells us. It provides a single email address that need never change.
Or it did. Last week Danny received an email informing him of the university’s new “BathMail” service. It included the sentence: “We will be switching off the Email for Life forwarding service on 2 July 2012.”
So the university authorities have apparently decided that life as they know it is now at an end.
WHILE the US continues its war on some drugs, it welcomes others with open arms.
A friend of a friend of Feedback reports that drugs were being readily dispensed in the minibar of the room he stayed in at a New York hotel.
Blister packs of medications such as ibuprofen and the antihistamine diphenhydramine, labelled with phrases like “Help. I have an aching body” and “Help. I can’t sleep”, could be accessed by any guest simply by opening the minibar door.
The drugs on offer were all completely legal, of course, so that’s alright then.
SPAM emails offering you a cut of an implausibly large, probably illegal and certainly fictitious financial transaction are depressingly common. Ola Olsson was a little startled to be addressed thus: “I contacted you by this means due to a financial transaction that involves a deposit of $17.3 in my bank in China. As a senior manager and the account officer of the deceased depositor…”
READER Ian Witham, meanwhile, wonders why he never gets spam in French or German, which he can read, but lots in Chinese and Korean, which he cannot.
We checked our spam archive and discovered a similar preponderance of messages in Korean, Japanese and something in Chinese characters.
With the magic of technology we translated one of these (“From the technical personnel to manage the backbone of combat skills”); one email in Hebrew (“One phone call you know if you deserve money from the state”) and one in Malay (“Christmas loans”).
Like Ian, we find relatively little we are able to read in the original language – and most of that is to do with impotence fears. Why? How do we get on these lists?
A NOTICE in Malvern, Worcestershire, declares an “Alcohol Controlled Area”. Jim Ainsworth understands that many people are controlled by alcohol some of the time, and some people are controlled by it much of the time, but how can it take charge of a whole area?
A VENDING machine at a gym Sasha Frank attends sells cans of Celsius Sports drink in flavours such as “green tea” and “wild berries”. Each can carries the slogan: “Burn up to 100 Calories or more in each can”.
Sasha, who sends us photos of the cans to illustrate his point, says he has thought about this statement for quite a while but remains thoroughly mystified by it. What do these drinks do, and how do they do it?
“Mike Coon’s box of Lyons coffee bags announces: “Best before: Apr 13 1290”. That was the year Edward 1 erected crosses around England in mourning for Queen Eleanor of Castile”
WHERE did we leave that “thing” story? Ah, yes, in the piling system…
Bruce Mitchell sent a lovely cutting from the Island and Mainland News of 11 August 2010, reporting a number of drug raids on Bribie Island, off Australia’s Queensland coast. “A 57-year-old Bellara woman was charged after she was found in possession of a drug utensil and thing.”
We asked Bruce whether there was any chance that this was related to the Jamaican-inspired usage we have come across in London, in which “an’ t’ing” is equivalent to “et cetera”. No, he says: Bribie Island is “a fifties flashback monoculture of People Who Play Bowls,” with the possible exception of the arrested woman.
So, Queensland residents beware: if you are in possession of any thing, hide it well now.
FINALLY, there is a tub of vitamin E cream in John Light’s bathroom which says: “100 per cent happiness guaranteed.”
John asks: “How long should I give it before concluding it isn’t working?”