RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31755, 12 August 1968, Page 18

RANDOM REMINDER

SPRING CLEAN

It is usual business practise, we are told, to clear the desk before the week-end, so that on Monday morning, one arrives at the office with a feeling of well-being, and competence, and being on Top of the Job. We are not like that In fact, this Monday, we are going to start clearing the desk. So if this note seems something of a muddle, readers will have the comfort of knowing that when it is ended we at least will have a feeling of well-being, if not of competence. How the mail accumulates . . . There’s a gentleman in Hornby who writes to say that a fine new building has gone up there to house a computer, and the day the computer arrived was the first one—he says—that anyone realised it was too big to go through any of the doors. They had a bit of trouble at Rangiora lately too. The milk bar attendant felt like calling for the union secretary when an American visitor ordered a thick milk shake —five great bulldozer-like scoops of ice cream, malt, and milk. The machine, whining like a mother-in-law, struggled with the

mess for 10 minutes, although the ice cream had first been chopped up with a knife. The customer drank it like soup, with a long-handled spoon. An unhappy bystander said it sounded like a Republican convention.

For discomfort, we turn to the situation in which a Christchurch doctor found himself while doing nothing more heinous than watching a boys’ football match at Hagley Park on a Saturday morning, with a friend. The doctor brought his dog—rather suitably named Jasper—and Jasper, with all the cheering and so on, made, in all the excitement, a very simple mistake, failing to detect the difference between the arborial and sartorial. His master’s friend was the sufferer, and it all led to a very long piece of verse on our desk, nearly all of which is quite unprintable. Which is why it is not being printed. From a quite different source, a report of a man prominent in local body affairs, a background which explains his extremely practical turn of mind. He is in the habit of going with several

friends to a motor hotel on a Saturday afternoon. He and his friends are not expected, by those at home, to be late; the others invariably lay the blame on the shoulders of the public body man. Because he always insists, on the way home, on stopping to buy fish and chips; more than that, he insists on eating them on a quiet road because, he says, he has a young family, and they would leave him nothing but the grease-stained newspaper. It’s about time the rest of the mess on the desk was shoved beneath a blotter. But we would be interested to know the background of the advertisement published at the instance of a city hotel manager, and making known that he has a heifer for sale. It seems an odd sort of hobby. Does he have a roof garden? Or has he tried, and failed, with a further development of the “choose your own cut and watch it’ cook” idea for the dining room? It might just have been the winning of a wager. It’s so hard to tell, with hotel managers.