DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
Donelan Andrews with the contract. PICTURE: Via SquareMouth.
• A lesson in reading the fine print – a US high school teacher recently won herself $US10,000, just by reading the terms and conditions that came with a travel insurance policy she’d purchased for a trip to England. Georgia-based Donelan Andrews was fortunate to have done so – SquareMouth, a Florida-based travel insurance company, had inserted a clause into the terms and conditions in which it promised to give $US10,000 to the first person who spotted the clause and emailed the company about it. Andrews made contact 23 hours after the ”Pays to Read” contest was launched. The company says it ran the competition in an effort to “highlight the importance of reading policy documents”. SquareMouth also donated $US10,000 to Reading Is Fundamental, a children’s literacy charity, and $US5,000 to each of the two schools Andrews works at.
• Turns out that Wales may not be as big as we thought it was. Myrddyn Phillips, a mountain surveyor in the UK, is reportedly claiming that the border between the two countries has been incorrectly marked on official Ordnance Survey maps since at least 1887 and that, as a result, England is owed more than 167,000 square metres of land. No-one’s racing to arms over the matter, however – and Ordnance Survey reportedly says it stands by its maps.
• A Western Union telegram sent to a US man congratulating him on his university graduation reached its destination recently – more than 50 years after it was first sent. The telegram was reportedly first delivered to the Ann Arbor apartment in which Robert Fink lived with classmates a day after he had left to attend a graduate school in New York. It was recently discovered in the bottom of an old filing cabinet now owned by an Ann Arbor-based digital marketing agency. Christina Zaske, who found the telegram, saw Fink’s name and used the internet to track him down. Fink, now a university professor, said he regrets never having had the chance to thank the family friends that had sent the telegram (they’ve both died since). Still, better later than never.
