KEY POINTS:
RAZ says: "The telephone books in the picture were dumped over a week ago at 64 Cook St, Auckland City. After few days of the books soaking in the rain I doubt that anyone will collect their copy. Another couple of trees wasted. I wonder if the distributors are paid on commission?"
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A freelance journalist on a story called all six of the default KiwiSaver providers, leaving voicemail messages where no one was available to speak. They all replied, bar one, Mercer. The next business day the journalist got a call from Anita Agosta of Melbourne-based PR agency Buchan, who said that all inquiries about Mercer's KiwiSaver product should be directed to her office in Australia in the first instance. Agosta squirmed a little when asked if she was available from 7 in the morning New Zealand time (5am Melbourne time) for inquiries. "It seems that Australians' ambitions to take over New Zealand know no bounds: even our own home-grown KiwiSaver isn't sacrosanct," says the journalist.
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After Dancing With The Stars (and every second story on their current events programmes), viewers are used to TV One promoting their shows in their news bulletin, but on Tuesday night the line between reality and fiction was thoroughly blurred with the story on the junior doctors' strike. The fetching young doctor being interviewed in support of the strike was Amin Sheikh, who plays Dinesh on TV2's Shortland Street. One way of subsidising a pitiful pay rate, I guess.
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Typos are easy to make and sometimes expensive to fix: In March, Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe called the state assembly into special session partly to deal with a typo in a 2007 law that had mistakenly allowed girls of any age (even infants) to marry with their parents' consent. A special session costs taxpayers about $25,000 a day. Around the same time, a candidate for a congressional seat in West Virginia discovered her name had been misspelled on the ballots. According to state law, the error had to be corrected at taxpayers' expense, costing US$100,000 ($125,000). Is one answer to such errors to use "auto-correct" function in Microsoft Word? Definitely not. In Writer's Digest, a woman says that when she worked for a Department of Energy laboratory, she submitted a proposal to someone with the last name Prono. The spell-checker automatically changed poor Mr Prono's name to ... you guessed it. The mistake wasn't corrected and the proposal failed. (Source: Typo Tales & Tactics by Marcia Yudkin).
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Cliff Bindon says that with food prices going through the roof, it pays to shop around: "It is said that competition is fierce between supermarkets, but if it is true, it must be at a very profitable level. I went into New World, Te Rapa, for some kiwifruit but refused to pay $5.99 per kilo after my wife paid $1.99 the previous week. A week later, I bought new-season's kiwifruit at a specialty fruit shop for 99 cents a kilo and then found more at another New World across the road at $4.99!
Today's Webpick: A new compilation of dumb game show moments from the 70s. Watch it here.
These are the very best online videos from Ana's online magazine Spare Room.
