Saw the panels below by an elevator. The left one is the familiar elevator control; the one on the right, however, uses fake buttons and reads: “Before you press, think of your health – use the stairs!”
Good advice, nicely implemented…
Archive for February, 2010
We have a McDonald’s in downtown Jerusalem (of course!), but within spitting distance of it there is another kind of fast food restaurant, one that is dear to the hearts of the city’s old time residents. It is the Ta’ami restaurant.
Ta’ami is a tiny restaurant: one room, opening right onto the sidewalk in Shamai street, with a few tables inside. A working man’s eatery, it has no “wait to be seated” rule; in fact, you walk right in and sit on any free chair – not table: unrelated customers are expected to share the same table. No fuss, no niceties, but wonderful food, starting with Hummus that many say is the best in the land (and many others violently disagree; Hummus connoisseurship tends to run to high emotions).
So why is this a fast food joint? Well, here’s how this works: you go in, spy an empty chair, and as soon as your behind hits it, the waiter is at your side, rattling a list of dishes (though most regulars know what they want). You order, and in a minute or so your food is placed before you. No time wasted. But it goes beyond that, thanks to the legendary founder of Ta’ami, the late Mr. Albert Majar, whose photo adorns the wall. Albert came from Bulgaria around 1950, and started his family-run restaurant soon thereafter. His techniques of customer management were famous and cherished in our town. He’d go around the tiny hall and urge the clients to eat faster, to make room for more people to eat. His favorite phrase, “Swallow, don’t chew!”, became so famous that it is now the restaurant’s slogan. He also used to compact tables by switching people from table to table in mid-lunch, thereby freeing contiguous seats for people who came in groups. And so business was brisk, profits presumably grew, and a legend was born.
Not exacly the way they do it at McDonald’s… but what Hummus!
Was looking up RosettaStone, that Rolls Royce of computer-based language teaching tools. They have a nice web site with demo videos and all – very handy. And they had a video there promoting their system, and as it zipped past something seemed wrong. I rewinded a bit and there it was: my native Hebrew language, in a pattern that made no sense at all. It took a second to resolve: they had the hebrew word for Succeed – written backwards, left to right.
Of course it’s not uncommon to see a Windows program mess up the text direction of Hebrew (and, I suppose, other RTL languages) – after all, Redmond is not in Israel – but you’d expect a Languages school to catch this blooper…
We were in a large drugstore in Germany, when I noticed that all the shopping carts had a large magnifier lens attached to them, like this:
The magnifiers were fitted in a sturdy and elegant holder, designed to allow the carts to be stacked in a row as usual.
This was a new one for me… and it took me a moment to figure out the reason: these guys wanted their clients – even the elderly with their imperfect vision – to be able to read the fine print on the medicine packages.
I admit I was impressed that they care!
Every child knows that postage stamps are affixed to the top right corner of the envelope. You lick the stamp, and you press it to the envelope at that corner. And it stays there. Or does it?…
I was sending greeting cards recently, putting them in the envelopes they came with. Some of them sported envelopes made of some shiny gold-colored paper. I licked the stamp, put it on the paper… and in a few minutes, as soon as it had dried, the stamp would pop up, curl, and drop off. The envelope was golden, but it could not hold a stamp. You’d think the card manufacturer would pay attention to such a detail?!
These days vendors have become masters of trivial warnings, as seen in coffee cups that warn us their content is hot, and countless other examples. Recently I ran into an amusing case.
The little piggy is yet another form of the classic kitchen timer. What makes it interesting is the inscription on its base: “Not dishwasher safe” – in two languages too, not to take any chances.
I suppose there may actually exist people silly enough to try and dunk this along with the dishes… it’s a large planet. Still…
