Monday, May 7, 2012

Pork bellies in store for breakfast

A few weeks ago on my walk to work I saw a billboard ad: "Pop into any BNZ store." Hmmm, something's not right with this sentence. But what? Ah yes, it's the word "store". I tend to visit branches of banks myself, not "stores". A store is where I buy things. I don't buy things from my bank, or at least I try not to. Anyway I forgot about this ugly use of the word "store" until today. I work for a company that sells insurance "products" (there we go again) on behalf of banks including BNZ; some of our call centre staff had received a ticking off from BNZ for using the word "branch" on the phone instead of "store". Seriously? It's time big business stopped bastardising the English language.

As well as the branch/store thing, the subject of sugar came up at work today. It appears sugar is slowly killing us all. Someone at work wanted to stop giving her kids Up & Go for breakfast because of its sugar content, but she couldn't think of anything to replace it with. I suggested Weet-Bix with milk and maybe a teaspoon of sugar, but that was a non-starter because it takes too long to make and eat. My boss (a bloke) agreed - "we're too busy to have a proper breakfast". It seems a lot of people nowadays lead such hectic lives that breakfast no longer figures. For me it's always been the most important meal of the day.

Talking of food, at the last autism group one of the guys (who has, shall we say, an elevated BMI) salivated when I mentioned the pork belly with crackling that I'd eaten at my cousin's place the night before. To be honest I don't blame him: it was utterly delicious.

No comments:

Post a Comment