Have you read the T&Cs? Peter Rhodes on an internet dilemma, a yuletide burst pipe and a "racist" white campus
HERE is a strange thing, following last week's item on mouthwash. I never hum, sing or whistle How Much is that Doggie in the Window. But I always gargle it.
CONFUSING headlines department. A reader spotted this: "Police shoot man with knife at Amsterdam airport." Some knife.
THERE is a sort of game played out millions of times a day on the internet .It's the one when a company pretends it wants you to read its latest terms and conditions, and you pretend to do so. Except that we don't - because it would take ages - and every internet company knows that we don't.
SO here's one for the lawyers. If a company knows that a customer has not had time to read the T&Cs but allows him to trade regardless so long as he's clicked the "Accept" box, shouldn't it take some of the blame if anything goes wrong? Alternatively, let every online company ensure that its T&Cs are genuinely read, possibly by freezing the pages for as long as it would take the average person to read them - say 30 minutes or so. That won't happen because if we all read everything we're supposed to read, the global internet trade would grind to a shuddering halt.
IT must be strange living in Tewkesbury, flash- flood capital of the Midlands. All the ingredients were in place for a yuletide inundation: snow on the ground, rising river levels and the threat of a sudden thaw. So you move all your best furniture upstairs, park the car on higher ground and fit the anti-flood door barriers. And then you settle down for a nice cup of tea - only to find there's no water coming out of your taps. Severn Trent eventually fixed the burst in a massive pipe which left 10,000 families without water. I wonder how many of those families were haunted by the line from Coleridge's poem, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner: "Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."
SNOWFLAKE kids have been blamed for objecting to a weather message issued by University College London to let students know the place would remain open despite the snow. It went:"Dreaming of a white campus? Our campuses will be open and operating fully today." For anyone of a certain age "white campus" is a clever play on the words "white Christmas" from the much-loved Bing Crosby song of 1942. But some students denounced the message as racist and fascist, and the uni scrapped it, apologising with a grovelling: "We chose our words very poorly." Damn right. Parade the guilty men and women in public and send them for re-education. And for the benefit of any students reading this who are a bit shaky on modern history, Bing Crosby was Adolf Hitler's cultural attache and White Christmas was, of course, the marching song of the Waffen SS. Make sure you include this in your next essay.
AFTER 14 weeks Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1) has proven conclusively that dancers dance better than vicars.
