HUMOURS OF MUNICIPAL SERVICE
Council officials could, if they would relate many amusing experiences. There was, for instance, the sanitary inspector who advised the tenant of a small house of the insanitary state of which he had reason to complain, to disinfect it. The man replied: “I don’t don’t want a barf. Besides, I had a barf last year”! ( **' * * Another sanitary inspector received from a woman a note, reading: “Will you be good enough to let me have a dose of rat poison, as my husband will be home Saturday afternoon?” * ♦ * * Another note to an official: “My ceiling has fallen down. Yours thankfully, Mrs —.”
A man who had been assisted by the municipality to buy a house, wrote to complain of a neighbour: “Mr has lately been driving nails into my fence to give support to his plants. When told by me not to do so, as he damages the fragile fence, he threatened to drive one nail into me and one into my wife. As I have to keep the property in good repair I shall be glad to know what attitude I am to adopt.”
Then there was this note to a Mayor from a wife-seeking man: “Will you provide for me a wife, in whom character is more important than beauty, and a dowry more important than either.”
A woman wrote complaining of the house being infested by lice. What she said was: “I’ve had visitors in my bed during the night”!
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NEM19370624.2.118
Bibliographic details
Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 24 June 1937, Page 9
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245HUMOURS OF MUNICIPAL SERVICE Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 24 June 1937, Page 9
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