Tuesday, November 28, 2023
The Free State Department of Economic, Small Business Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs (DESTEA) has warned the business community of a fake tender invitation for the supply and delivery of 27 paper shredders.
“DESTEA has learned with concern about an opportunistic scammer purporting to be an official representative issuing a fraudulent invitation to an open tender for the appointment of a service provider to supply and deliver 27 paper shredders.
“The alleged scammer sends out fake tender/bid documents with DESTEA’s official logo and normal standard procedure to service providers, pretending to be an official representative of the department.
“Service providers are warned not to topple into the trap of fraudulent tender invitations, which are not from DESTEA,” the department said in a statement on Monday.
The department has urged business community members to report any suspected criminal acts to the South African Police Service and verify any request for tender with the DESTEA supply chain office as soon as they receive any correspondence alleged to be from the department on the following emails:
customercare@destea.gov.za(link sends e-mail)
mooketsio@destea.gov.za(link sends e-mail)
masemeb@destea.gov.za(link sends e-mail).
The business community is further urged to contact the DESTEA customer care on WhatsApp, 0829475394, for authentication. – SAnews.gov.za
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Wheels
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Miss Lucky
Yugoslavia: You have two cows. They die right after giving birth to 20 new cows.