confusing experience for a reporter.

Mr. Alan Wright has just returned from two weeks vacation in sunny Bermuda and he was able to leave his motorcycle and take advantage of public transport.

This includes wonderful trips and outstanding views on the ferries and buses, which must delight our visitors.

But public transport, the bus service in particular, can be a pretty mixed bag when you are trying to cover the 26 miles of the Island.

Most of the bus drivers are helpful and courteous with outstanding examples, witnessed by Wright, being Mr. B.A. Caines and Mr. Q.E. Simmons.

Mr. Caines was a pleasant man who showed great restraint when two young schoolgirls became hopelessly lost trying to find a specific bus stop.

Even more uplifting, and surely deserving of great credit, was Mr. Simmons who is a marvellous ambassador for the Country. An American visitor realised she had left her purse on a bench outside the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital.

Mr. Simmons stopped his bus on Collector's Hill, flagged down a car and asked the driver to give the woman a lift back to the hospital. He even gave her a ticket so she could continue her trip to St. George's without paying any extra.

While many drivers are just as helpful, it is fair to say that others could do well to look at Mr. Simmons and Mr. Caines as role models.

For example the driver who, arriving early at a South Road bus stop, waved Mr.

Wright away as he tried to stop her five yards away from the stop. After missing the previous early-arriving bus, this meant an hour at the bus stop, a large fraction of a day out.

And not forgetting the driver who stopped at the Bailey's Bay Ice Cream Parlour and berated the confused reporter because he did not signal that he DID NOT want the bus to stop.

Confusing, because Mr. Wright always believed the idea was to wave when he DID want the bus to stop. Perhaps this driver expects tour guides to provide visitors with his own personal semaphore.

Mr. Wright is now back on his motorbike and has a much better idea of where he will end up each day.

*** A tree planting ceremony atop smelly Pembroke Dump turned into a competition between two Government Ministers to see who could shovel the most dirt, you could say.

After striking the rocky, garbage-strewn ground a few times with his shovel, Works Minister the Hon. Leonard Gibbons gave up and stuck a fragile Bermuda cedar into the small hole -- plastic pot and all.

He then attempted to cover it with a few shovel-fulls of earth much to the dismay of his colleague, Environment Minister the Hon. Gerald Simons, who asked, "Shouldn't we take it out of the pot first?'' With an "I'll show you how it's done'' attitude, Sen. Simons lifted the tiny tree out of the ground.

He grabbed the shovel, and moving to another spot, pushed up his sleeves and drove it into the hard ground several times.

Assisted by technical officers, he then tore the plastic pot off the tiny tree and stuck it firmly in the hole.

Still not ready to pose for the cameras, he got even more `down and dirty', filling the hole with earth and patting it down with his bare hands until the thankful little cedar was firmly anchored on the dump's southern slope.

By the end of the month it should be joined by hundreds more trees as Government attempts to turn the dump into a massive park.

*** This paper's new policy of bylines -- tagging a reporter's name to a story -- has had a most disastrous side effect.

It has prompted an outburst of.. .well...looniness.

Take the case of the sports hack who received a verbal flogging over the phone for not printing some auto racing results.

Bad enough at the best of times. But at 7.30 a.m., and at home? Another journalist Miss Marina Esplin-Jones suffered a similarly appalling fate.

She, too, was awoken by the shrill sound of the blower. The time? 7 a.m., or thereabouts.

"Where's the verb? Where's the verb?'' the voice boomed down the line incomprehensibly.

Geddit? Our bleary-eyed hackette certainly didn't.

There was more to come. "Are you Bermudian?''..."You don't start sentences with conjunctions!''...

Perhaps unwisely Marina encouraged more manic outbursts by asking a few pertinent questions.

Who was this guy? How had he got her number? And what was he wittering on about? The certified one didn't -- perhaps, couldn't -- answer the first one. He failed to satisfy on the second.

And on the third, he burbled something about choking over his breakfast cereal at reading Marina's article on the gay sex row.

"I wouldn't put this example of journalism before my children!'' Particularly offensive, it appeared, was the opening line in the article (An issue of basic human rights or morality?) because it contained no verb.

Marina promptly hung up.

Whereupon, the loon rang up again -- although thanks to the magic of new technology the sound was deadened.

Oh yes, there is a minor postscript to this sad little tale.

The caller did reveal he was a school teacher.

*** It was a public relation officer's nightmare.

Business Systems Ltd., buoyed by the news that the Telecommunications Commission had approved its bid to provide E-mail and Internet service in Bermuda, invited the news media on Wednesday to see how the system worked.

To make it easier for all to see, the image from the computer terminal was enlarged and projected onto a screen.

It was a smooth ride on the information highway until BSL's office computer network crashed.

BSL managing director Mr. Nicholas Weare assured The Royal Gazette it could never happen once new hardware was brought in and Internet customers were brought on line in July.

Initiated in 1960 by the US Defence Department, the Internet computer network was built "to withstand a nuclear blast,'' he said.

INTERNET LINK -- Business Systems Ltd. of Bermuda had its licence approved this week to provide E-mail service and an Internet presence in Bermuda.

Internet is the largest computer network in the world, and BSL plans to offer local service in July. Here, BSL managing director Mr. Nicholas Weare (foreground), chairman and chief executive officer Mr. William Midon (left), and BSL product manager Mr. Tony Harriott pose with machines used to demonstrate their service.