It started when a father and son got on the bus and the son, a four-year-old, asked his dad if he could "click" the ticket.

One of the deadbeats piped up and said that "the only (idiots) that check tickets are in the city", intimating that the duo should dodge the fare because there was no chance of being caught.

A middle aged woman, who was a passenger, told the man to "grow up", to which one responded "we is grown up".

The trio then laughed that they had "put her in her place" before getting off at Eaglehawk and going into a pub.

Eaglehawk is easily the worst bus route for people not paying. It's very, very sad that this is the prevailing attitude among so many public transport users.

I write in support of your editorial “Unsociable media a real threat to decency”, (Bendigo Advertiser, April 15).

Greater Bendigo City Council is very concerned about the use of social media to spread misinformation, innuendo and defamatory comments.

Unfortunately, many people believe the misinformation carried by social media, and many users of social media argue “freedom of speech” to justify the dissemination of misinformation.

Rather than being a tool for free speech, the council believes social media is at risk of becoming a threat to the integrity of free speech by people who are often anonymous and hiding behind a social media platform.

Free speech was never intended to be an open invitation to deliberately misrepresent the truth to garner support for particular political causes and it is not an open invitation to repeatedly say whatever you like about someone without any basis in fact.

If you disagree with a council decision, then you must, of course, be free to say so publicly.

The problem arises when people use social media to spread misinformation about decisions or make repeated defamatory attacks on individual decision-makers.

The value we, as a council, community and country, place on free speech will be diminished if this abuse of free speech is allowed to continue.

I encourage people who read social media not to believe everything posted online and to question the motives behind the people who administer some social media pages.

About two weeks ago we had another power "interruption".

I contacted Powercor and was told there were quite a few outages in my area. Within minutes a Powercor representative rang back to tell me this is the way the "system" works.

It seems the "system" senses a fault and shuts down, then turns itself back on soon after. This usually happens overnight so my answering machine wakes me up demanding the time be reset.

Next comes resetting clock radios, microwaves etc. We had to turn our sensor floodlights off as with the power flicking off and on again, the lights stay on.

Good for your power bill.

We had to install surge protection after two computer burnouts. The "interruptions" occur on average every two weeks.

Routine maintenance, new work – you expect but this happens too often.

It seems you can change your power supplier but you are stuck with your delivery service.

As the representative said: "this is how it works.”

Badly.