Tim Wikiriwhi sent me this. It’s from Fonterra focus, October 2011.

I am the head of sales of a large automobile dealership. A customer is prepared to buy a vehicle from me on the condition that I record the transaction as having been made two weeks ago. It is now 14th January. For tax purposes, the customer wants to have the transaction recorded in the previous year. What do I do?

1. I doctor the accounts in accordance with the customer’s wishes.

2. I tell him that I will not honour his request.

3. In order to buy time, I promise him that I will think about his offer. This will make it more difficult for him to buy from one of my competitors in the meantime.

4. I tell the customer to talk to the managing director.

One reason I post this is because sometimes I “doctor” the timestamps on my posts. This is because my personal posting policy is “1 a day”. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I post just the title of a post and a promissory note, and come back later to finish writing. In any case, built in to WordPress is the ability to write posts and to embargo them so that they are officially published later. Even when you’re dead. When the timestamp of a post bears little relationship to when it was actually posted, I usually indicate that by marking the time as 6:00 AM or 6:00 PM. (You see this when you mouse over the date immediately under the post’s title.) I’m not trying to deceive anyone. Hence this disclaimer. (If you’re really bothered by this, go talk to the managing director.)