Sideswipe: Enter at your own risk

"I think it's pronounced 'Shar-ga'," says Alistair Bailey who saw this sign in a mall in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Sideswipe hopes that's the case.

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The petrol scammer was nearly caught in the act, says a reader: "I was eating my lunch in my car in Cornwall Park and reading the Herald. A guy knocked on my window and gave me the 'on the way to Helensville' story. I gave him $4 in change and he went off. About a minute later I read your column and the story about this guy! What a weird feeling. If I had read your column before he came up I would have said, 'Sorry mate, you're in the Herald' and saved myself $4!"

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Antidote to the petrol scammer: "On Tuesday September 29, at 3.30pm, I had a miserable encounter with a huge puddle on the Greville Rd off ramp on the North Shore. It sent my car into a spin which, luckily, caused no damage to us and minor damage to the car. But I ended up stuck in mud at the side of the road. While I was there, totally shaken and calming my daughter down, this lovely man (together with another concerned family) came to check if we were okay. He then said he would go home to Browns Bay (quite a few kilometres away and the weather was very unpleasant) and bring his 4x4 and chains. After about 15 minutes he returned and got my car out of the mud. I was still a bit off-colour and didn't have the time to voice anything more than a mere 'thank you'. At the risk of sounding like a cliche I think people like him make this world a better place."

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Children in a school in Germany had a day to remember when four pupils found about €15,000 ($30,000) - and then handed it out to their friends in the playground. Police said the four - two boys and two girls aged between 10 and 13 - found the bundle of cash stuffed in a dirty brown envelope on the way into their school in Frankfurt last week. One worried child went to the teaching staff and the children were told to return the money. "But since some were quite pleased by their new-found wealth, with many already making plans for what they would spend it on, collecting the money proved to be harder than handing it out," police said. By the time a police arrived, about €12,000 had been collected, and the total rose to €14,040 after teachers made a final appeal to their pupils' consciences. Because the possible owner of the money, identified later as a 33-year-old Afghan man, unable to say exactly how much was in the envelope, it was not known how much was still missing, police spokesman Karlheinz Wagner said.

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