/ 3 August 2006

Run, don’t walk

The manne with timeshares on the West Coast near the Visdorp are selling. Their logic is simple. Nobody was suspended when Koeberg broke. Alec Erwin still hasn’t found somewhere to pin his loose bolt, and hasn’t had to prove his allegations.

So just exactly what did five employees have to do to get suspended this week? When you say ”technical violations”, are we talking fast-tracking safety procedures, or playing touch rugby in the reactor core? And who thought it would be reassuring to announce that Eskom ”probably would not have suspended” the culprits but for the presence of a regulatory official in the building at the time? Lemmer is off to stock up on iodine tablets and lead panels for his underpants.

Your money or your site!

Neil Watson, founder and ranter-in-chief of the crime-porn website Crimexposouthafrica.org, made sure we all knew about it when his site was hacked and temporarily shut down by saboteurs. At least three news websites ran the story, in which Kleinboet Neil spat defiance and dared the cyber censors to do their worst. But this week the Oom came across a fascinating posting on Moneyweb’s online forum: an anonymous employee of MWeb Business revealing that there had been no sabotage. Indeed, wrote the cyber guru, it was MWeb Business itself that had shut down the site briefly. The reason? Watson hadn’t paid.

It’s a write-off

This week Zimbabwe eliminated three zeroes from its currency, apparently because the country’s banking computers were cracking under the strain of having to work out, for example, 1 000% interest on a trillion-dollar loan taken out to pay for a carton of smokes. Buoyed by the success of this strategy, the state will next eliminate three shantytowns, followed by three opposition candidates, and eventually three decades of post-independence progress.

Gaudeamus igitur

Beleaguered by mergers and non-specific, non-confrontational, non-compus-mentus renamings, staff at many universities are finding comic relief in the acronyms they now work for. Oom Krisjan hears that the Nelson Mandela Metropole University (NMMU) is now fondly known as ”No More Money University,” while the Walter Sisulu University (WSU) has become ”Won’t Survive Ultimately”. Of course not everyone has a sense of humour: rumour has it that staff at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology face expulsion by management if they refer to their institution by its logical acronym: Kaput.