What's the deal?
A READER who works in Glasgow's city centre phones to tell us: "Our office computers were down today and our manager came out and told us all that we had to do everything manually.
"It took me a while to find a pack of cards so that I could get on with my game of Solitaire."
Wait a Moe
WHAT in heaven's name is going on at Westminster? We turn to political writer and former Herald columnist Hugo Rifkind who explains: "So many members of the Cabinet ought to resign that none of them can. It's like the Three Stooges trying to get through a door."
Being civil
AND the cancellation of the scheduled meeting of the Cabinet reminds reader John Henderson: "In the sixties there was the 'I'm Backing Britain' campaign to haul the country out of the doldrums, and there was even a group of typists in Surbiton who reacted patriotically by working an extra half-hour each day without pay. Prime Minister Harold Wilson brought it up at Cabinet and said each Government Minister should come up with something to help boost the economy. He turned to Denis Healey who suggested nothing would help the country more than civil servants working half-an-hour less each day."
Paws for effect
OUR bus stories remind Kenneth Morin in Newton Mearns: "There was the apocryphal story about the man on the Glasgow bus with his dog who was told by the conductor, 'Your dug's no allowed to sit on the seat.' 'I'll pay his fare,' says the dog owner. 'Okay,' says the clippie, 'but he'll have to put his feet on the flair like everyone else'."
A modern message
GROWING old continued. A member of a Glasgow bowling club heard a fellow member declare: "I must be getting stronger. Twenty years it took both me and the missus to carry £50 of shopping from the supermarket to the car.
"Now I can manage it with one hand."
Eye eye
AH it will soon be the time for dodgy chat-up lines at office Christmas parties. A reader shook his head last year when he heard a young chap tell a female after work in the pub: "You look great without glasses." "I don't wear glasses," she told him, which gave him the opening to put on a pair of glasses on and say: "Yes, but I do."
Breathless response
OUR GP stories continue with Leslie Goskirk in Lairg telling us: "Many years ago my great aunt, feeling unwell, sent for her GP. When he arrived she told him, 'Oh doctor, I'm awful short of breath,' and he replied, 'There will come a day when you'll be even shorter of it'. Fortunately she saw the funny side - and lived for another 30 plus years."
Speedy response
SAYS William Dalgleish in Sanquhar: "Your story about excuses for speeding reminds me of the time as a boy I was being brought home from a Queen of the South match by an elderly uncle in a Baby Austin car. He kept glancing at the petrol gauge and started driving at an ever increasing speed. When asked what the matter was he replied that he was trying to get home before running out of petrol. I don't think he had quite grasped how an internal combustion engine operates, and I wonder how Sanquhar's finest would have reacted to that excuse."
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