Mincing About on a Bus With a Poodle Could Cost You GBP30

By IAN McCONNELL BUSINESS DIARY

CALL us old-fashioned, but Business Diary likes the English language to be used conventionally.

Waiting to step off one of FirstGroup’s vehicles the other day in Glasgow city centre, dutifully holding a valid ticket for the journey, we were intrigued by one particular notice.

It set out the anatomy of a bus ticket and talked about how, if a person did not hold a valid ticket or an adult had for some reason bought a child ticket for himself or herself, he or she would be liable to pay the “standard fare”.

What’s this? Are bus conductors no longer dishing out fines?

Reading on, however, all was not as it seemed.

Turns out the “standard fare” is GBP30. Ouch. And, much like a parking ticket, it rises even further if it is not paid.

It might be in next year’s Christmas crackers: “When is a fine not a fine? When it’s a ‘standard fare’.”

Crackers is the word. After all, we know FirstGroup fares have been rising, but have you ever seen someone heading on to a bus asking for “a GBP30″, instead of “a GBP1.40″?

Interesting use of the word “standard”. Maybe it’s like poodles. Toy, miniature and standard (ie the giant one that’s about the size of a Shetland pony).

Business Diary has recorded previously that FirstGroup chief executive Moir Lockhead oversaw the mincing of his Highland cow, Jock, which ended up being served as “Jockburgers” at a family barbecue after it tried to kick his daughter while being groomed. But it is Lockhead who should stop mincing – his words.

No sex please, we’re instant messagers THE China Daily is known for, from time to time, banging the drum for this emerging economic powerhouse.

This week, showing how far the country has come already from its anti-capitalist notions, it highlighted a list of the most “Googled” words in China.

Noting, perhaps haughtily, that “sex” was the most popular keyword for Google users in some other countries, it trumpeted the fact that this was not the case in China.

Probably reflecting huge flotations of financial institutions in recent times, China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and China Construction Bank ranked second, third and sixth. Remaining on the investment theme, “stock” was in fourth.

In first position was QQ. Not the sherry: that’s QC. QQ, it turns out, is a Chinese instant message service and brand of car.

So have China’s citizens become focused on banking flotations and cars to the exclusion of anything else? Or could their Google preferences have anything at all to do with their Communist government’s extremely tight rein on internet content and several campaigns to root out online pornography? Who can tell?

E-mail? What a waste of time EAST Lothian company Seton Notes this week issued a press release on the training it offers to those whose lives have been blighted by e-mail overload. We were told that Seton director Sally Turnham, who has been working for some years in efficiency consultancy, turned to the e-mail issue after finding most users, “whilst delighted with the immediacy of the medium”, were “frustrated by the demands it placed on their time”.

From Business Diary’s perspective, “frustrated” is right. Not so sure about “delighted”.

Turnham said: “On average, e-mail users spend 25-per cent of their time dealing with e-mails. We have uncovered that 50-per cent of that time is wasted.”

We, and we suspect many others, would be utterly “delighted” if it were only 50-per cent.

Probably not the best brew HOSTILITIES intensified even further this week between Scottish & Newcastle and currently unwanted bidder Carlsberg, after a Swedish arbitration panel issued a statement about the timing of its decision on a dispute between the pair.

S&N was swift to welcome a statement which it claimed meant that the panel would rule on its attempt to have Carlsberg ejected from their Baltic Beverage Holding joint venture by July 3. Carlsberg claimed that such cases “typically take in excess of 12 months” and that the panel was merely setting out a standard timetable.

It seems increasingly amazing that S&N and Carlsberg worked together harmoniously for years in their BBH joint venture.

Now, it would appear, they cannot agree on anything. Not even the interpretation of a simple statement from a third party.

Oh dear, oh dear. Sounds like they might need a marriage guidance counsellor rather than an arbiter.

Probably not the best relationship in the world.

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

(c) 2008 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.