Sideswipe

Picture / Mark Mitchell

This photo should be used at health and safety training courses. Although obviously staged, it shows an apprentice testing a circuit while standing on an aluminium ladder, which is not good practice. Aluminium ladder manufacturers are required to fix a label to their products warning people not to use them near a potential electrical hazard. Then there's the fact that there are two people on the ladder at the same time, one of whom has his hands stuffed in his pockets. An accident waiting to happen.

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Margaret Burden spotted a parking warden filling her quota in one swoop at Oteha Valley Rd park-and-ride this week. She writes: Given that the parking at the park-and-ride is seriously inadequate for the number of people who want to use the buses, people have taken to parking on the grass verges when the car park and both sides of the road leading to it are full. Is the North Shore City Council filling their coffers by providing inadequate parking and then employing someone to ticket the hapless travelling public? If the cost of using public transport ($125 a month for a student) is an added parking ticket, then it is cheaper to drive into town and pay for parking, thereby causing further congestion on the roads and totally negating the city council's drive to get cars off the road and people on to public transport.

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Police in France say they have thwarted an attempt by a group of marijuana smokers to roll the world's longest joint by seizing an 80cm work-in-progress. "At some point, these young people had wanted to craft a joint of 1.12m to beat the world record in the discipline and get it officially registered," a police officer in eastern France said. "We don't know who had the idea. Sometimes ideas are created in an astonishing way." During an investigation targeting a group of four smokers in the eastern Vosges area of France, police discovered the giant joint containing 70g of cannabis resin. It had not been finished because of a lack of tobacco.

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In response to the school fees (donation) saga in Sideswipe: Here is the way one woman stopped being hassled for her donation. Linda Lloyd writes: "Having four children at the same school and only one income, the school donation or fee was beyond my means, so I rang the school and explained that I would pay it off as and when I could afford to during the year. This apparently was not good enough; the demanding notices still kept coming. I rang the school each time and explained the situation. After about the fourth demand, which said 'your school donation is overdue, please pay immediately', I wrote in thick red pen on the demand letter the meaning of the word donation and sent it back to the school with copies of the latest power, rates and insurance accounts and said: 'Swap, you pay these and I will happily pay your donation'. Problem solved. I was never asked again for a donation and, yes, by the time my children had all left that school all the donations were paid off by instalments."