RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29950, 11 October 1962, Page 28

RANDOM REMINDER

RIPOSTE

After racing and Rugby, one of the most popular pastimes in New Zealand is criticising the employees in all the government departments. One can hardly drop the office pencil or park the office car before being asked to make up a four to go into the deficiencies of this department and its work, or that Among older men, the youth of the day provides a diversionary topic on similar lines. And when one can cite a case about a teenage government employee. one can really hold the floor. They are said to lack loyalty, ability, energy ’and initiative, just as a start We heard a story the other day about a young man who had joined the Railways Department; our source swears it is true. We have our

doubts, but it makes, perhaps, a point. The young man started as an assistant or probationary fireman, and was issued with some sort of suitable uniform. He was teamed up with a driver in his middle fifties: they were from different sdiools.

All was well for a few days, until the new boy’s girl friend, feeling her fireman should be a la mode, stove-piped the issue pants. The driver was horrified, but in the interests of esprit de corps, said nothing. However he quietly made some arrangements, and he was the first to leave the gathering after morning tea next day. Seconds later, the young fireman was at the bottom of a ruck, the central figure in a process known at the English universities as debag-

ging. The stove-piped trousers were taken up the 80-foot tower in the shunting yards from which those huge lights shine down on brave men and unfair women. This was a good joke. Until the driver remembered that he had a trip to do, and that it would hardly be proper to aet off on it with a fireman whose limbs were covered only briefly in underpants. Time was running out. So he took off his own overalls and gave them to the youngster so he could go up and retrieve his trousers. The rest may be obvious. The fireman climbed the tower, and looking rather like a trapeze artist, took off the overalls. He put on his own trousers. And he descended, leaving the jester’s overalls aloft.