FEEDBACK

WHEN Don Dennis and family process bookings taken by phone for their guest house on the island of Gigha, off the west coast of Scotland, their Ingenico TT42 credit card machine asks if the card holder is present or not. They answer by hitting the button indicating “no”.

The printed slip the machine produces correctly states “Customer Not Present”. Yet a little further down it states “Signature Verified”, which it clearly wasn’t.

The family also runs a small mail-order business. Their orders over the phone usually get paid in this same way, with the same misleading printout. The two businesses between them put through about 3000 payments of this type last year.

“Let’s imagine there are 10,000 small firms in the UK which operate as we do, with the same equipment – and I have hardly seen any other hardware in use,” says Don. “If, on average, these companies put through the same number of payments

Beside the Grand Union canal near Tring in southern England there is a sign which, Bieglo Derby tells us, says: “Tring Angling Club. No Fishing Allowed”

each year as we do, then that’s 30 million completely incorrect statements being printed in the UK each year.”

Don wonders whether readers can think of any equally flagrant falsehoods that are being disseminated in such quantity. He also wonders whether equivalent machines around the globe print out similar messages. If they do, the number of such false statements becomes truly vast.

WE EXPRESSED surprise on 2 October that Rentokil thinks it helpful to tell customers that its rat poison “contains natural whole wheat”. Mick Khan thinks we missed a possible explanation. “It could be a warning to rats with gluten allergy or intolerance, who would be advised to use an alternative gluten-free poison,” he suggests.

HERE, for a change, is a disclaimer that we rather like. It came with the manual for the solar-powered house-number panel bought by

Matthew Hilder in Wentworth Falls, New South Wales, Australia. “Warning: The warnings, cautions, and instructions discussed in this instruction manual cannot cover all possible conditions and situations that may occur. It must be understood by the operator that common sense and caution are factors which cannot be built into this product, but must be supplied by the operator.”

THE email Roy Wood was sent promoting Binatone satnav systems promised him they feature “Up to millions* of pre-installed Points of Interest such as parking, hotels, restaurants, petrol stations etc”.

To add to the statement’s deficiencies in the meaning department, there was no explanation of the asterisk beside “millions”. This is a shame, because there could have been a note at the bottom of the message reading: “* For example, 3, or 3 million”.

HERE is a strong candidate for the Feedback bad acronym award. A press release from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council announces nine new projects aimed at uncovering links between diet and health.

Worth a total of £4 million, the projects are funded by a public-private partnership of three UK research councils and 13 food and drink companies. And someone has chosen to call the ensemble the Diet and Health Research Industry Club (DRINC).

Cheers, everybody.

TRANSPORT for London, which runs many of the city’s trains, fills spare advertising poster spots with its “Art on the Underground” project. A recent example offers the statement “I feel that my sense of self is fluid”. It goes on to state that “50 per cent of people asked answered either true or false to this

question in a recent survey of Jubilee Line customers”.

John Priestland wants to know what the other 50 per cent answered.

THE invitation sent out by Arena International Events Group, reminding recipients of the European Nuclear Supply Chain conference to be held in London next week, includes what Nick Weston describes as “an unfortunate turn of phrase”. Headed “Strategies to maximise your nuclear supply chain”, the invitation begins: “Utility companies from across Europe are poised for an explosion in new nuclear reactor construction projects.” Now that’s worrying.

FINALLY, Paul Robinson’s parents were given a Sharp microwave by a neighbour who had no need for it. It came without a manual, so Paul set about trying to find one online.

He tried the company’s UK website, where the “Need Help?” box seemed the place to start. But when he entered what he believed to be the model number, r-249, into the space labelled “search by model no.”, the site told him: “Your search for ‘r-249’ returned no results.”

Trying to be helpful, it went on: “The closest match was ‘r-29’ which returned 0 results.”

It’s the thought that counts.

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72 | NewScientist | 13 November 2010

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