Anecdotes

Not that my life hasn't been interesting recently (four presentations in four [work] days) - but I thought I'd share a couple of stories I've heard from the various places I've visited and people I've seen with you instead of just talking about me. I've got no reason to believe these aren't true, but I've also got no 'reliable' sources either - so, with a pinch of salt :)

Out of place
"A friend of mine's a policeman back in Norwich, and one fine summer day he was walking along Gentleman's Walk (Main Street) when he came across a couple of tourists. They looked a little bemused, and were getting some very strange looks. The policeman strolled up, and asked them if everything was ok, trying to hide a smirk on their face, and received a question he'd rather been expecting:

"Can you tell us how to get to the beach?"

I say he'd been expecting this - they were wearing bathing costumes, flip flops and carrying a surfboard, on a Sunday lunchtime, in Norwich. Now, for those of you who aren't aware of this, Norwich is a good 20 miles away from any beach at all - the policeman ended up pointing them at the train station. Apparently, the couple's hotel was advertised as 'good for access to the beach', and this couple had taken the advertisement a bit too seriously.

Working away from home

Quite a while ago, back when I was still toddling around, a certain insurance company with the initials L and G decided to get rid of a lot of their regional offices. They replaced these with some hot-desking areas, that never had enough space, and weren't too well located, in an attempt to get their guys working from home. They then gave out a bunch of cash to their disgruntled employees in order to fund a lot of home offices.

Now, many of these employees weren't too happy about being forced to spend a lot more time at home with their wife and kids (proper men, eh?), and so a bunch of them clubbed together, and got themselves a small office above a sandwich shop in the centre of town. As this wasn't a corporate office, depsite a lot of fuss from the lawyers, L&G couldn't do anything about all of the pictures of...not well dressed women on the walls, the No Smoking policy and the like.

Plus they made a profit on the whole deal too.

Fully covered

An American (who else) 'lady' was known to have once called up her breakdown cover company because she was unable to get into her car. When they arrived, sure enough, the doors were locked. They began to pry their way in, when she noted that the keys weren't permanently lost, merely misplaced. Misplaced about four feet towards the earth in fact. She was so obese/lazy, that she couldn't pick up the keys from the floor in front of the car, where she'd just dropped them. I'm still quite curious as to why she didn't merely ask a passer-by though...

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Update: Today's randomness is brought to you by the random world of the Blogosphere. Julie has an answer to somebody's question of the day - 'Clowns: Delightful or Terrifying - read her reply, if you dare.