This morning I was working at home before going to the office, when I suddenly heard some sounds outside my study window. I looked up and saw a building cleaner hanging on some ropes outside my balcony! I managed to take two pictures before he used his abseil technique to clean the 36 floors below my apartment.

A Shanghai man wants to divorce his wife, because she keeps on surprising him with jokes. The last one was just too much for him. On the night of April 1 he came home from a tiring business trip, when he was shocked to see that his wife had hanged herself in the living room. According to the Shanghai Daily she had made it look as real as possible, and indeed her husband did not see it was fake.

He immediately called the police and the property management office. The property management helped him to put the body on a sofa, while the woman kept on acting as if she had died. While they were waiting for the police to arrive, the woman suddenly jumped up while shouting: “Happy April Fool’s Day!”.

This was too much for the man, and he now wants to file for divorce. He mentioned that his wife always made jokes with him, and he could not stand it anymore. He gave another example to the newspaper, saying that his wife once changed the lock and refused to let him in before correctly answering several quiz questions. The woman thought that making jokes kept the couple close, but it now turned out it had the opposite effect.

This afternoon I had lunch with Sam Flemming in my office, and we ordered two pizza’s from Melrose Pizza. I like their pizza’s, and delivery is always quick. I just received a flyer in my mailbox with a special promotion offer, two medium pizza’s for RMB 99, so we decided to go for that. While ordering we mentioned the promotion, but when the delivery guy arrived he wanted to charge us RMB 155. The receptionist came to my office to tell me I had to pay more, so I walked with her to the entrance to find out what the problem was. The delivery boy told us that they had made a mistake (the pizza’s that he brought us were not on sale, or something like that), so we had to pay extra. Interesting logic, they make a mistake, so we need to pay extra. The receptionist then called Melrose pizza to explain the problem, but they were quite arrogant and told us we had to pay. And if we didn’t want the pizza at a higher price they would never deliver to us again. I told the receptionist I would call the English number that they provided, and she mentioned that to the Melrose lady she was talking to. Her answer: go ahead, we won’t answer! I tried to call, and indeed they pushed my call away.

At that point Sam joined the conversation, who happened to indirectly know the owner of Melrose Pizza (Melrose is a franchise organization). He could not get hold of him right away, but the owner would call me back. So I decided to pay (my assistant had negotiated the price down to RMB 140 in the mean time) and wait for his call. He called within 5 minutes and apologized for what happened. He then asked which number I had called, and I gave him the number. He asked me to repeat it, and then said: “But that is not a Melrose Pizza number!”. He would check it out and call me back. He did call back about 10 minutes later, but did not tell me what exactly happened. He just wanted to know my address and would send me something to make it up to me.

That’s great service, and I appreciate it, but I now wonder whether there is a fake Melrose Pizza place in Shanghai. I noticed that the number on the pizza box was indeed different from the one on the flyer that I received. Yes, they not only copied the flyer, but even the box including the real phone number! In case you want to give it a try, the “fake” Melrose pizza can be reached at 021-5887 6011. Their fake English hotline is a mobile phone number: 1391 841 6180. If you want to make some prank calls, go ahead. But if you want the real Melrose Pizza call 800-620-9797. I hope the owner can quickly sort out this problem. Next time I will use the 800-number to order his pizza’s.