Roger Watts of Tauranga snapped this unlikely pair of road users in the suburb of Greerton.
People who faked their own death
1. Corey Taylor pretended to be dead to get out of a cellphone contract with an unsatisfactory provider. He had a friend fax in a doctored death certificate. The company figured out the lie and he forked over the US$175 he owed and positioned himself as a champion of the dissatisfied telco consumer.
2. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, staged his own death in 1965 to avoid being busted for marijuana. Parking his car near a cliff, he left a suicide note which read, "Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end", and fled to Mexico. When he returned, less than a year later, he was sent to jail for five months.
3. Hugo Jose Sanchez worked for British retail giant HMV. He pretended to die of a heart attack and moved the family to Costa Rica. The company bought the lie and paid out his pension. But his scheme began to unravel when a friend attempted to use Hugo's HMV discount card to buy a CD by Elvis Presley. The friend even called Hugo from the police station, but Hugo hung up. Investigators quickly unravelled the plot.
(Source: Oddee.com)
Fooling the identity thieves
There is a rubber blackout stamp that is used to obscure your address, so when the identity thieves go through your wheelie bin they won't get any of your personal information "because that's how identity theft happens" - not online.
Dig out those old vouchers
A reader writes: "I went into Mitre 10 in Glenfield and purchased three items. With tongue firmly in cheek I offered a gift voucher. The checkout lady looked at it, smiled and picked up the phone. She gave the voucher details and was given the okay to accept it. She then had problems getting the cash register to accept it. The supervisor came over, looked at the voucher and laughed. Why all this fuss? Well, the voucher was issued in 1983! Good on you, Mitre 10 Mega. Westfield and some other companies could learn a lot from you about customer relationships."