Late-night game shows

Last night (well, sort of this morning), we watched a lone presenter on a late-night phone-in game show.

How it worked was this:

you had to call in and name 6 German cities ending in -BURG.

Easy? Well we got loads together, but when we rang in (for 49c/call) we always got told that we had a line that didn’t go through to the studio. Of 100 lines, only 5 at first and later 10 actually got you further.

On closer inspection, for over half an hour no-one was sucessful and the poor presenter was left trying to think up things to say to encourage more people to call.

This is unusual: normally the questions on such games are really easy to get people to give it a try – all lines are then open and the winner is picked at random. We thought this sounded harder and was worth trying out.

Well, for reference, here are the cities that were already named and so no good to us:

Hamburg, Flensburg, Lüneburg, Saarburg, Madgeburg, Oldenburg.

And here are the ones that we thought of:

Siegburg, Marburg, Coburg, Rottenburg, Altenburg, Neuburg, Meersburg, Homburg (Saar), Offenburg, Freiburg, Ginsheim-Gustavsburg, Ludwigsburg, Weilburg, Westerburg, Weltersburg, Limburg and of course Bad Homburg.

If you want to add to the list, feel free to do so in the forum – but we can’t offer any prize money!

Meanwhile, we are going back to playing the SMS game on “Wer wird Millionär?”…

Shopping for longer in Hessen

Hessen has changed it’s laws on shop opening hours. From 1st December onwards, shops can stay open round the clock from Monday to Saturday, Sundays and Bank Holidays are generally only allowed for six hours – and only then after the main church services.

Well, living in Hessen I’m waiting to see if any of the shops in Oberursel extend their hours. In the town centre the shops shut on Saturday at 1pm at the moment, even though they could stay open a lot longer. So maybe this new law won’t make that much difference and only one or two large supermarkets will stay open any longer.

One large shopping centre, “Main-Taunus-Zentrum”, is trialling longer hours in December, so maybe we will go there and try out the late-night shopping.

We’re used to the 24-hours supermarkets in England and it’s always a highlight of our trips there to go out shoppinig in the middle of the night to stock up on the things we want to bring back to Germany with us.

A share of the profit?

Chancellor Merkel has suggested that employees should have a share of the profits of their employers. She has charged her social minister to come up with suggestions how this could work.

I have come across this sort of thing in large companies – where the bonus depends on the profit. If the results are bad, then you get less bonus – fair enough.

But sometimes you have to ask yourself why the results are so bad when everyone is doing a good job.

I have also come across the situation where a profit was made, but the bonus was still low because the profit was not considered to be big enough!

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