Sideswipe: May 12: Horror in Hunua

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A reader writes: "During the lockdown, urban parents encouraged their children to look for toy bears in neighbours' windows as a distraction from the coronavirus. More worldly-wise rural kids in Hunua are told look out for bears and something from an American horror story."

Worst Work Stuff-ups …

1. Accidentally sent a mass email to my old company's thousands of clients that, instead of ending with "Kind Regards", ended with "Kind Retards".

2. First day of job in educational reference library in old primary school hall with floor-to-ceiling windows. Couldn't see computer screen due to sun, so tried to pull heavy duty curtains. The whole lot came down, including guy on step ladder who'd just finished hanging them.

3. I locked 300 people in a cinema. As manager I thought the last film had finished it hadn't. Locked the front door. Staff, rather than calling me, showed people out the fire exit. Did not end well.

4. Accidentally pressed "correct all" instead of "cancel" when spell-checking a feature I'd written about a local businesswoman. The next day, I got a call from her husband asking why the Birmingham Post had printed an article naming his wife "Natasha Psychopath".

5. Someone once thought the comments field on an automated payments system wasn't actually used for anything, until we had an inquiry from hundreds of contractors asking why our cheques had "oi oi, saveloy!" printed on them.

It's a bit like that, isn't it?

It's a bit like that, isn't it?

Me? How?

"When I was really young, I was convinced I was pregnant (I'm a man btw), with a baby cat named Bridget," writes a reader. "My family decided to see how long I would believe this so they never told me how ridiculously impossible that was. I went on believing it for about five months (that's how long little me thought cat pregnancy lasted), and then when the baby never came, I went to my mother and asked when Bridget would be born. She finally told me that boys can't get pregnant and humans can't give birth to cats. I was traumatised; so excited to be a cat father, and then it was ripped away from me. Explainer: This would've been around 6 years old. I was raised Catholic and thought God put babies in your stomach, so I thought he put a cat in me. As for the name, I just really liked the name Bridget ... I never ended up getting a cat."