Sideswipe: July 14: Tradie stuff-ups

"This was in the backyard of a house we bought a few years ago," writes Rosemary from Whangārei. "The patio support was inserted between ropes and cemented into the ground. Had to totally dismantle the clothesline and move it so we could actually fold it down."

Family fire drills

"I never realised until I started living with my husband that it's not normal to be woken up at 3am by your dad setting off the fire alarm and having to climb through your bedroom window and shimmy down the roof on to the shed and into the back garden within 15 minutes or you'd be declared 'a fatality'. It's something we've always done growing up and I thought it was so normal. Turns out it's not."

Exit this way — stories from a Kiwi funeral director…

Granddad looked after our budgies while we were away overseas, but when we came back, he took us out into the garden and solemnly told us that one of them had died. Then he showed us a small plot with a tiny monument on it, where the bird was buried. Ever one to make a buck, he said he would tend the grave for as long as we liked for a minimal annual fee. We didn't have to pay right then, but an IOU would be okay, and we could sort it out later. After a few years - by which time we were in our teens - he confessed that, in fact, their cat had eaten the budgie when it escaped from its cage and there was nothing of it left. That gives a whole new depth of meaning to the idea of "The Tomb of the Unknown Budgie".

Ducked driveway

A driveway crew was pouring concrete at a new house next to a duck pond. They went to lunch and came back to this.

Getting politician's name right

When Virginia senator William B. Spong Jr. first went to Washington in late 1966, he worried that the media might mistakenly pronounce his name Sponge. But he observed that his Senate colleagues included Russell B. Long and Hiram L. Fong. So in introducing himself at the National Press Club, he announced that the three of them would be introducing a bill to protect the rights of songwriters in Hong Kong. It would be called the Long Fong Spong Hong Kong Song Bill. They never introduced the bill, but the media never mispronounced Spong's name.