It's good to have multi-lingual signs at international airports, but badly translated signs like this one at Chennai International Airport in India can lead to all sorts of confusion. A better translation of the original Hindi would be, "Sitting and eating on the carpet is prohibited." (Via RocketNews24.com)
One good turn deserves ... something
"Years ago, when I was at university, I boarded in one of the student hostels and had a part-time job about a two-stage bus ride away," writes a reader. "A fellow boarder - Monique - also had a part-time job at the same place, but she had the luxury of her own car. She never offered me a ride to or from work, even when we were working the same shifts, and I never expected her to. One day, she had parked down a poorly lit and deserted street, and was too scared to walk to her car by herself. We'd both knocked off at the same time so she asked would I mind walking her to her car, and I obliged. When we reached her car, she said 'thanks', jumped in and drove off, leaving me standing there alone in the same poorly lit and deserted street she had been too scared to walk down herself! We were both heading back to the hostel and, at the very least, she could have driven me back to the well-lit and more populated main street bus stop. I recalled this incredibly selfish act, and wondered if any other readers have their own 'Monique' story?"
Man of steel destroys chainsaw
"A school friend's father was a plasterer," writes Eric Strickett. "While doing repair work on old houses he was constantly picking up all types of manufactured steel including lengths of chain, which he took home, thinking they might come in useful. He was a product of those hard times when nobody had much money, nothing was thrown away, all was recycled! Eventually he had a big pile of collected items so he decided to tidy up and 'file' all this by hanging the bits and pieces in the bottom branches of a row of macrocarpas he had recently planted. Many years later those trees had grown too tall and were shading his property, so he got some contractors to cut them down. All that steel chain was now buried inside those trees and those poor guys wrecked a chainsaw - sparks flying out from the cut where the chain had hit buried steel. They asked what was going on and his dad suddenly remembered, and told this story."
