British Expat Newsletter

10 September 2003

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

This week: Impostors
Virtual Snacks
Bizarre Searches
Joke and quotation

This week

This is our first update for a couple of weeks. Sorry for the gap, but we hope that the improvements we've been making to the site make up for it. In the last few days alone we've added a British Expat site search engine powered by Google, a daily cartoon - Snapshots from Jason Love - and a Recipe of the Week page for the foodies among you. Anyway, on with the show.

Ever been had up (or even just plain had) by a fake official? There are plenty of pretty plausible people around who can spin a good yarn, as we all know from those public information films in the early Seventies. (Dave says his favourite was the harassed housewife whose doorbell kept ringing at an increasingly frenetic pitch with each caller - the insurance assessor, the gasman, and so on - until eventually she almost refused entry to her husband. Meanwhile the earlier "callers" had emptied their living room of all its contents.) But I digress.

Anyway, what prompted that particular thought was the news in one of the Delhi papers that a local man had just been arrested after having impersonated a police officer for, er, ten years! Apparently he'd always wanted to be a policeman but failed the exam in 1992. Undaunted, he simply had himself some uniforms and namebadges made up and strolled around the streets in a policemanly sort of way. Even the police in his suburb assumed he was genuine as he claimed to be posted in the capital's VIP security department. He finally came a cropper when he asked a building contractor to sell him a flat at half the asking price on the grounds that he was an officer of the Central Bureau of Investigation. Over the ten years he'd amassed three uniforms, 23 fake ID cards, 10 police wallets, and a scooter with police colours (and one can only speculate as to how many kickbacks.)

As you'll know if you've visited the site recently, we've launched a new web-based email service. It's an improvement over the old one in a number of ways - not least because you can now collect mail from your existing static email box, and forward your webmail automatically to your static account when you're not on the move. Better still, we aren't limited to 100 users without tripling what we have to pay the service provider! So if you'd like to sign up for it, please click the link at the top of the right-hand column.

Virtual Snacks

http://www.dilbert.com Are there any other Dilbert fans here? I'm always happy when the Daily Dilbert cartoon arrives. You can sign up on their site to receive a daily cartoon by email. It's brilliant and it's free.

Try "The Spark" for a lot of fun tests. Find out if you're gay, or what sex you are (just in case you didn't know already) and loads more:
The Spark: Tests

And finally a completely daft game. (I probably don't need to say this one was suggested by Squiffy.) www.flingthecow.com Highly recommended if you enjoy chucking virtual cows around.

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

how to please a man with kinkiness (6)
mohican hairstyle (3)
being a millionaire (3)
1.3 (2)
etiquette for dentists (1)
Lebanese sex magazine (1)
sharp bedrooms (1)
how to write a letter to tell your clients you have relocated (1)
expat monkey (1)

Till next time...
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Joke

More of an amusing story really.

Mobile phone owners are probably all aware of the dangers of making calls by accidentally pressing the redial button. But it's easy to slip up every now and again, as one would-be fraudster can testify to his cost.

The Loss Management Group in the UK - which insures jewellery among other things - received a call one day from a man detailing a number of valuable items which had been stolen from him. (They hadn't - he'd just come across the details in a house clearance.) He then put the phone in his pocket and started bragging to his friends about the fraud he was committing. Unfortunately for him, he hadn't locked the phone and managed to press the redial button by accident. So the firm were treated to a blow-by-blow account - all captured on the "this call is being recorded for training purposes" tape - of how the guy was trying to rip them off. (Story first appeared on silicon.com)