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best films – but wasn’t it a bit gory for two young girls?

    JIM NICOL in Lenzie tells us of a friend’s seven-year-old son wanting to help his dad with the Evening Times crossword. The dad had mixed emotions when the lad looked at the clue “Raining heavily” which began with P, ending in “ing” and suggested “pissing”, rather than the expected answer “pouring”, as at least it fitted. But where did he learn such language?

    A YOUNG mum was overheard telling her friends on the Glasgow to Edinburgh train: “I caught my husband staring at our son in his cot with an obvious look of pride and affection on his face.
    “He then spoiled it all by saying, ‘I can’t believe we got such a good cot for under a hundred quid.”’

    A READER at a play park heard a father shout at his young son, who was keeping the toys to himself: “Sonny! Share! Sonny! Share!” Inevitably, one of the other parents started singing: “I got you babe.”

3.
From Shipyards To Call Centres
    Employment in Scotland has gone from shipyards to call centres. But thankfully the humour still remains.

    GOVERNMENT plans to cut the number of people claiming incapacity benefit have not gone unnoticed by the staff at Maryhill’s Jobcentre Plus in Glasgow who will have to implement the policy.
    They now refer to their office as Lourdes.

    “I GOT woken up today by some idiot banging on my window,” said the chap in the pub the other night. “I was raging. There were two other tellers who could have cashed his pension.”

    A PSYCHIATRIST tells us that when she is buttonholed at a party and asked what she does to help people with low self-esteem, her quick answer is: “I tell them they should become politicians. That usually solves it.”

    A HUMAN resources worker in Glasgow’s call-centre sector tells us he interviewed a chap who had been fired from his last two jobs. When he queried this with him, the bold chap replied: “Well at least it shows I’m not a quitter.”

    COLIN MACFARLANE’S book Gorbals Diehards , about growing up there in the sixties, tells of shipyard worker Jimmy who explained a fellow worker was nicknamed Brewer’s Droop as his name was Wullie Falls. More opaque was the foreman every worker called Such. That came about, explained Jimmy, when he was promoted to foreman and told the men: “I’m now the boss, and from now on I want to be addressed as such.”

    TALKING of shipyards, reader Jim Morrison reminds us of the classic gag: “A Clydebank chap invited a young lady to his flat for a nightcap. ‘See that carpet? It’s aff the QE2 . And see that chest of drawers? That’s aff the Queen Mary . And see that sideboard? It’s aff the Queen Elizabeth ,’ he said.
    “‘Is that right?’ said the young lady. ‘Is this some kind of boat hoose?’
    “‘Naw,’ replied the chap, ‘I just rent it aff the cooncil.”’

    OUR STORY about shipyard workers with sticky fingers reminds Mark Johnston of a neighbour who kept a Queen Mary coffeepot from the final voyage of the Clyde steamer before it became a floating restaurant in London. Says Mark: “Unfortunately, during a break-in a few years later, the coffeepot was stolen.
    “As my neighbour was giving a list of the stolen objects to the policeman, he hesitated when asked how much he paid for the coffeepot.
    “Picking up on this, the policeman simply told him, ‘Shall we just say it fell off the back of a boat, Sir?”’

    AS FINAL year students start applying for jobs, we pass on a tip from recruitment company Career Builders which says that many CVs are automatically rejected by companies because of folk having unprofessional e-mail addresses.
    “One candidate,” says the company, “had an e-mail address with ‘loves-beer’ in it. Another candidate had put God down as a referee, but alas did not provide a contact phone number.”

    A READER tells us he overheard two women discussing the new staffer in their office. “She looks a bit like Paris