One

Man: Hi! I’m calling to tell you about some holiday arrangements I tried to make. Earlier this week I logged on to the Holiday Home website to rent a room. It works like this: people advertise spare rooms and potential guests contact them through the site to arrange the details. I booked a room or so I thought. Back bounced an email saying I was rejected because the site requires users to verify their online identity. It turned out you need at least 150 Facebook friends. I only have 50! I know that you’ve got a large audience and I wonder if anybody else has had a similar problem. I may not have a fully developed “online identity” – but that doesn’t mean I’m not real! Can you talk about the problem on air? I think it’s important.

Two

Man: Is it true that Irish consumers are eating fewer and fewer potatoes?

Woman: Well, new figures have revealed this trend and they confirm that it’s because of an increasing taste for rice and pasta dishes. Sales of potatoes have decreased by more than 8% during the past year. Caroline Evans, the president of the Potato Council, says retailers should take urgent steps to stop this drop and take a new approach to advertising. She believes that when consumers are shown more options for potato- based products, sales will go up. According to data from Worldpanel, 90% of consumers who were buying fewer potatoes didn’t realize they’d reduced their consumption.

Three

Woman: And now something about licence agreements. You know they’re those walls of text you have to click under to instal any software on your computer. Hardly anyone bothers to read these monotonous lines of terms and conditions. What a mistake! To prove this, one software company included a clause in its licence agreement that promised a financial bonus to anyone who read it. All they had to do was send a note to an e-mail address given there. Four months and 3,000 downloads later, one person finally wrote in and got a check for $1000 proving that it really DOES pay to read the licence agreements! So, let’s start reading them. You never know what’s inside.