Ok, I took a look at this...

When you create an object and try to scale the vertices, it will scale along the object.

UNLESS

You've frozen transformations... Freezing transformations makes the object "freeze" at its current position and resets the channel controls back to default, which when you created the object were aligned with the world coordinates. So, it's still scaling with local coordinates, but your local axis happens to match your world axis...

Hope that made sense.