Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Dead Photocopyist



Fortean Times #321 (December 2014), p. 71.

Letters

Dead-icated

There was a 1980s tradition going around the Greater London Council in its last days that there was a windowless basement “photocopying section” to which particularly useless staff members were exiled, to do photocopying all day. The same legend says that there were comings and goings around a particular photocopier over a few days, and it wasn’t till one of the people was about to leave one day that they noticed a guy who appeared to be leaning up against the wall near one photocopier that was churning out a particularly big run of photocopies, apparently waiting for the run to finish. One particularly eagle-eyed worker, by the standards of a demotivated workforce who couldn’t care less, eventually spotted that he wasn’t moving. He’d been dead, standing up against the wall (leaning against a radiator in the version I heard), his body kept warm by the heat from the photocopier and the radiator. Various photocopying jobsworths had come and gone and just assumed he was working on a particularly big photocopying job all those days.

The story was told me in the tone of some sort of example of how dysfunctional bits of the GLC had become.

Matt Salusbury
London

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Naïve Woman Sews Up Holes in Man's Underwear




Sydney Morning Herald
12 November 2014


[…] The socks that shorted a honeymoon (C8, Tuesday)  reminded Jock Grieve, of Tumbi Umbi, of a friend of his late mother  "who, on her honeymoon just after WWII wondered why, when putting them away, her new husband's mother had not sewn up all the holes in every piece of underwear he had. Turned out that they were all of the Y-front variety most men had back then which, coming from an all-girl household, she had never seen before." […]

Times Colonist [Victoria, BC]
11 Nov 2004

The war at home
Turnips for lunch every day, chicken bones saved for airplane glue, flour-sack nighties and underwear held up by safety pins -- readers recall sacrifices, big and small, made in 1944

Katherine Dedyna

[…] Deborra Higgins of Victoria writes of a naive 18-year-old girl in Scotland who is now her mother-in-law. An only child, this young lady helped her mother provide meals, warm beds and laundry service for Canadian soldiers on leave.

"Much to her dismay, she noticed that the men's underwear had holes in the front, creating -- she was sure -- quite a draft! So she 'made do' by sewing up the holes! Well, one of the young men was so smitten with her good intentions that he ended up marrying her.'' Her mother-in-law blushes to this day at this story. […]

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

"Drug Test Trick" Foiled by Pregnancy




BBC News
4 November 2014


An Egyptian bus driver who tried to avoid a drugs test by using his wife's urine has been busted after it turned out his wife was pregnant, it's reported.

The man had been selected for a standard drugs test along with other public bus drivers, but did not submit his own urine sample, instead using his wife's, the Al-Yawm al-Sabi website reports. What he didn't know was that his wife was two months' pregnant. Before revealing the news, officials asked the driver to confirm the sample was in fact his own, according to Tamer Amin, a presenter on the political talk show Bottom Line. After the driver said it was, the officials reportedly responded: "Congratulations, you're pregnant." […]