Sideswipe: June 7: Marketing team is bang on

Taxi response goes extra mile

Duncan booked a green cab online and was dismayed when it didn't show ... That dismay turned to anger and he sent a terse email of complaint to the company.

This was their reply: "I do apologise that our taxi wasn't able to pick you up but we've still got a few glitches in our time-travelling taxi fleet at this stage so it seems our driver over-shot and ended up arriving on 5th of July 2058 instead. He said the world is a utopia where they can cure any illness (even death) and Earth is currently embroiled in an extra-terrestrial conflict with zealous separatists of the Mars colony.

"We're attempting to retrieve our driver from the future but his flux capacitor ran out of charge and Earth 2058 has a strict ban on time-travel parts after the great Time-War of 43BC (apparently Julius Caesar did more than we know) ... On a serious note, I do apologise but it seems that this may have been booked for the wrong month ... "

Childhood as it was ...

1.

During the 1950 polio epidemic, Annie and her cousins were sent to live with her grandmother so that they would be "out of harm's way". "We had read Peter Pan, the boy who could fly, and one day with the aid of a very rickety ladder, climbed on to the roof. We then tied six balloons to the youngest and lightest of us who was 5 — one on each arm and leg and two on his belt. Telling him he could be like Peter Pan, we told him to jump. Which he did. Four balloons burst on impact and the other two floated off. There were no major injuries and he will be 72 next birthday."

2.

"My sister-in-law tells me that 45 years ago, in a South Island town which shall remain nameless, her mother attended social afternoons of bridge before then picking her and her brother up from school. On the way home in their Fiat Bambina her mother would slalom in and out of the parking meters on the main street while the children stood up with their heads out of the sun-roof, offering vociferous exhortation. Apparently G&T was a popular accompaniment to the cards ..."

3

. "I was about 13 years old, at the pub with my dad one evening. We lived about 20km out in the country. We left the pub, he drove through the two sets of traffic lights, turned on to the country road, stopped the car and said 'you can drive me home, I'm too drunk' and I did. Whangarei in the early 80s."