Reporter’s diary

Press, 5 December 1988, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

M.E.D. muddle

NO, the M.E.D.’s middle name is not Ebeneezer Scrooge. Some subscribers in the Sumner area were alarmed to get their new, computerised accounts which put the date for discount payment three days before payment could be accepted at the Wakefield Avenue office. The system usually works well for people who cannot get into town easily, and who take advantage of the office being open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. for the three days before accounts are due. A mix-up in dates was purely accidental, says the M.E.D. Subscribers who would still like to pay at the Wakefield Avenue office from December 19 to 21 should ring 790-900 with their consumer number to have the due date postponed a week. Noise annoys THE deer farmer in Blenheim who complained

that low-flying aircraft from Ohakea were responsible for scaring three of his stags to death would find a farmer in Berwick, Britain, sympathetic to his problem. There, at a meeting of the borough’s health committee, councillors agreed to pass on a complaint to the R.A.F., after “a local farmer’s three-legged dog toppled over when it was surprised by a low-flying jet.” Losing count A photograph of two banking types celebrating their company’s billion status brought the comment from a reader that a billion is a billion — but only in some places. Remember, he cautions, that a million in the United States is the same as in Britain, but after that, it gets tricky. British values are more conservative so that, there, a billion is a million x million, a trillion is a million x billion and a

quadrillion is a giddy million x trillion. A billion in the United States is only a thousand x million, a trillion is a million x million and a quadrillion a mere million x billion. In other words, if you’re a billionaire in Britain, you’ve got more money than a billionaire in New York. Relative poverty THE chairman of Consolidated Gold Fields, Rudolph Agnew, gave a bullish presentation of the company’s prospects to institutional investors in London recently. "The Financial Times” reports that he was asked why, if things were going so well, the directors had so few shares in the company. Agnew, whose salary rose by 29 per cent last year to £315,026, said: “I can’t speak for the other directors but I don’t hold many shares because I am a poor man. And I’m poor because I’ve been married three times.”

Fowl play WATCHING a duck with her ducklings in the Avon, a tourist asked a local resident where the drakes went, and what they did while the ducks reared their young. The resident didn't know, so turned to us. We didn’t have a clue so asked our tame ornithologist. The truth is not nice. “Oh, they cruise around.” Is that all? Don’t they help their mates? “They eat. And sleep.” Worse is to come. “If a duck is disturbed and leaves the nest and its eggs for any reason, she’ll be put through a kind of gang rape by the cruising drakes.” We’re sorry we asked. Fleeced ON a Range Rover parked in the grounds of St Andrew’s College, the registration plate: “WOOL 4U.”

—Jenny Setchell