"A few months back I saw the electricity company little LandRover 4WD pull up nose into my gate. A blue-white skinned man, who I later found spoke with a quaint English accent got out."

There it is now fixed and the usual diatribes against a significant element of our cultural heritage can begin - along with the denunciation of those awful Christians (he would have be one wouldn't he?).

For myself, I will be content to sledge the long-suffering LandRover owners with impunity - even if Tata has a hand in there somewhere (yikes, if that is discovered the PC police will be onto me like blowies).

Q: Why are LandRovers considered 'green'?
A: Because they return the oil to the environment while you drive.

Speaking of the English, here is John Cleese,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FamNyMUZlw

[Deleted. Offensive.]

Individual can we talk? I in fact do not wish to get down in the gutter, disagree with just about every thing you say.
I am unsure if you know how offended I am by your manner.
Can we agree to avoid one another?
I can not bring myself to give any value to anything you say, lets put OLO first ok?
Have a great Christmas and good by.
Now pat the Bogan, well thought out name.
I have no idea why you launched in with that, offensive and uncalled for.
You never met a bloke who likes Aussie bush humor more than me.
Have not seen any from you.
So many trying to look like WITS end up looking like TWITS.

I thought this was a thread about over-charging when I approved it, not whether drawing attention to someone's ethnicity was racist or not. I did think about the "dark-skinned" and "poor English" bits, but people do say these things (Dame Joan Sutherland quite famously for one when talking about the Post Office), and it did provide a bit of colour.

But it has led to this thread being on the verge of getting out of hand. If the level of aggression doesn't wind back down I will probably start deleting threads and handing out suspensions. Maybe both Hasbeen and I will be more careful in future.

And I tried to tell PatTheBogan that I had deleted his post but his email address on the system is no longer current. Perhaps he can mail me and I'll send him the email to his new address.

Graham

I can’t see a thing in the world wrong with Hasbeen’s comments:

<< A little dark skinned man, who I later found has very poor English got out. >>

It will be a dark day indeed when we can’t describe people in this sort of simple straightforward, neutrally descriptive terminology. I very strongly think that it would be a real shame if general threads, or articles for that matter, were sanitised to removed such comments.

I think that all posts on this thread that concentrate on the alleged racist comments and don’t entertain any discussion on the intended thread topic should be deleted, as they are blatantly off-topic!

So in the interests of obeying the forum rules and keeping this post from being etherised, I’ll write something on-topic:

I sympathise with Hasbeen’s concerns about false meter reading and hence false billing and hence our (the consumer’s) confidence in all those companies/utilities that provide services and send us bills.