Sideswipe: Sanitary kind of love

Photo / Supplied

Sign at the Anglican Church in Kaikoura, spotted by Seth.

An accessory for your accessory

Cathy noticed an auction for an iPAD licence plate on Trade Me amid all the iPad hoopla last week, with the hefty price tag of $20,000. According to the auction: "Plates have been manufactured ... ready to put straight on to a car once ownership transfer papers are signed and faxed. iPAD has been safely kept in an investment folder and has never been used on a NZ vehicle." Needless to say, it didn't sell and one punter commented: "I have two friends, Stu Pidd and Wayne Kerr who would LOVE to buy this plate."

Highly un-shellfish behaviour

A pat on the back instead of a whinge: "Tonight my husband returned home with two dozen scallops from Countdown Greenlane," says Lynnie Lind. "In one pottle there were nine and in the other 12. Feeling somewhat ripped off, I rang the store at around 7pm and was put through to the store manager, Dave, who happily offered to deliver a dozen scallops to my door on his way home 30 minutes later." Marvellous service!

Invitation to vegetate in public

A dozen huge grass sofas have been installed at tourist attractions around the UK - in a bizarre bid to get couch potatoes out of the house. The sofas - some of which are 8m long - are the idea of the National Trust and are made from a base of straw which has been watered and trimmed to size, and covered in a green grass blanket. Bosses came up with the odd idea after it was revealed the average family spends 43 hours a week on their sofa, even in the summer. Each sofa is also positioned in an "outdoor living room" and took just over a month to grow. (Source: nationaltrust.org.uk)

Let's get the fax straight

Roy Keane was misinformed when he was told that a $5 fax fee he was charged for a prescription was "for the paper", says Jill. "The charge is for handling. Faxes may seem to be convenient but they create a lot of extra work for already stretched pharmacy resources. Legally, we need the original prescription so a faxed prescription has to be kept out of the system until we get that original. The original then has to be matched and checked against the faxed copy before it can be included in the system. Some surgeries are very good at sending us the originals but I have staff spending many hours (and toll-calls) chasing up these original scripts. While this might not seem much for one script, multiply it by 20 or 30 a week. Several years ago before we started charging fax fees we were handling, on average, 30 faxed scripts a day. Now we are down to 40 or so a week."