The JaYmes Escape

OK, so whilst I’m hanging out in Auckland waiting for the jobs market to catch up with me I’ve decided that it’s time to share some of the inevitable frustrations with New Zealand and general Southern-Hemispheric culture. Stupid words for things and irritations, all with tongue firmly in cheek because I love the place really.

First of all, the single greatest annoyance has to be the word ‘capsicum’. How can they denigrate a perfectly decent vegetable by giving it such a ridiculous name? It’s a pepper dammit, and even the Americans agree with us on that, which must be a first. Number two is the car park. In English a car park is a vast area where lots of cars can park. Not so here. For here a car park is simply one space for one car, or in English, a parking space. This creates some faintly amusing ads like ‘flat to rent, includes free carpark’ but is otherwise just plain wrong.

Next it’s EFTPOS. This absolutely horrendous acronym stands for ‘Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale’, which is an incredibly pretensious way of saying that you can buy something with a card that transfers money straight out of your bank account. To me that’s simply a debit card and yes, we have PIN numbers on them too. One can only assume the marketing department had a flu epidemic, or perhaps just a collective seizure, when they named it. Can you imagine the brainstorming session that produced that? “Oh yes, I know, we’ll call it EFTPOS, that’s short and snappy”, “WOW why didn’t I think of that” and so on. They really earned their dollars that day.

Finally, for this installment (there’s plenty more), it’s music in supermarkets. Not the mildly offensive KwikSave or Texas Homecare muzak, or even the teeth-grinding Asda jingles, but a constant stream of loud, insipid, eighties ‘classic hits’, the worst aspect of which is that half the customers in the store walk around humming them as they pick up tins of spaghetti and examine their Peppers, sorry, Capsicums. It’s like being an extra in a zombie movie, I’m half expecting one of them to turn around mid song and break out into an evil cackle with vampire teeth.