Month: July 2021

Sometimes it is the little things that are so much fun. My colleagues really enjoy when I visit the client’s kantine, or cafeteria. The reason for their joy is that my German is actually not perfect, and to make it worse I tend to have an “American” accent when speaking. Every language has its little quirks – Japanese for example has no “L” sound and when speaking with Japanese people in English you might catch an “R” sound where the L sound might be. While Hungarian has a lot of rolling R’s.

Well my problem with German is my R’s, which make some of the words come out as understandable but not quite perfect. While I was telling a story to a friend about how my children didn’t want me to read to them in German, I ended up at the front of the line. Not only was I not able to order my “Rinder Ragout”(roughly beef stew) and but somehow I wasn’t able to get any “Brokkoli” either. I found that to be both frustrating and funny as the other side dishes were rice, potatoes, and pasta – none of which sounded anything like broccoli.

With this as my background I did get a small insight into how others deal with these difficulties. My colleague explained how a friend of his from Bratislava ordered beer when in Cologne, Germany. He went up to the bar and said he wanted a beer. The bartender held up a small glass, 0.2 liter, which would have been the local specialty of Kölsch.

He vigorously shook his head no and pointed to the half liter weizen glasses that were nearby. None of this pesky talking and being misunderstood, nah, just point and grunt.

There is a cafeteria that I visit when working at a certain client. They are actually fairly organized, there is a menu posted to the intranet that shows what the menu will be over a two week period.

The cafeteria has three different main dishes as well as a “special” dish. The special dish is usually not that much different than cafeteria food despite being twice the price of the regular dish, but I digress.

One of the good yet odd things about the cafeteria is that they have a computer screen outside quickly showing the menu options. This is always broken down into the following screens.

3 The special menu description

2 A picture of the special menu on a plate

2 The other three dishes described

2 The four side dishes described

The number to the left of these screens is approximately how many seconds the information is displayed. The special is usually a very flowery description of what the menu contains and usually cannot be read in a single viewing. The other menu options are not quite as wordy but it usually takes more than a few views to determine what the overall menu choices are.

Perhaps I am just a difficult customer but I would have thought that having a slightly longer delay per screen, say 4 or 5 seconds each, would be more reasonable. I guess who ever created this “online” menu never had to use it, or was a speed reader.

As much as I would like to embarrass my local electronic store, I suspect it really isn’t their fault. The history of computing, if you go back far enough, is littered with acronyms such as ASCII and EBCDIC which were the character sets that computers used.

These character sets were designed to represent numbers, Latin letters in both upper and lower case, punctuation as well as some control codes. These character sets did include support for diacritic marks found in other languages such as Celtic, …, Estonian, Finnish, French, … German, Slavic, Spanish just to name a few.

Apparently other cultures were fond of the proper representation of their written language so in the intervening decades there were new character set solutions where developed on computers which did correct this shortcoming. Either the software came from an English speaking country or no effort was made to support local languages or perhaps both.

What was this item? It is a “Universal sortiment kasten 20 fächer” otherwise known as a small plastic box that was divided up into 20 compartments each of which can be used hold small parts.

While I was in college I met someone else who was going to night school. She was taking computer classes. It was not clear exactly how we got onto the subject but we were speaking about binary numbers. She said that they were talking about this in her class, perhaps I was being a jerk but I asked for a bit more detail.

She said, you know that binary is base two it is about ones and twos. The words had just barely cleared her mouth when she realized what she said. She then corrected herself to mean that binary is zeros and ones – just a second too late.

A lot of cities, states and countries have tried various methods to increase the money collected to support government services. If you have ever gotten a speeding ticket due to the placement of a speed camera or police car you may have some negative feelings. In Slovakia they tried having camera + speed camera’s setups to catch the unwary.

Unfortunately for the police, it was decided in court that this was an in-acceptable method of catching speeders. The decision was that you must actually confront the driver with the evidence as it was possible under the other situation a ticket would be mailed to the car owner yet not whoever was speeding.

It was after this ruling that a farmer happened to notice a police car that was “staked out” in a small depression on his property. This police officer was undoubtedly “doing good works” for the public. It is possible that this particular farmer had been caught by other police do gooders in the past as that explains his dislike of the entire situation.

This farmer had a very clever idea. He went into the pig barn loaded manure spreader which turned out to be almost full which was pretty close to the 8000 liter or approximately 2100 gallons of liquid fertilizer. He drove to the top of the hill overlooking the speed trap and proceeded to dump its load on the ground letting gravity do the rest.

No, after that no other police car was ever seen parking in that particular spot.

How many times have you see something or experienced something with a friend or partner and suggested you will never let them live that one down. I guess I am better at making that promise than carrying it out – it is probably better for my marriage that is the case. Yet there is one example that I just cannot let go.

There is virtually no ironing going on in our household, and if there is it is me who is doing it. I do bring this up to my wife who always tries to explain it away. My retort is always virtually the same.

“your grandmother actually used to iron the pillow cases”

“when you were visiting me in Chicago, youwould iron my pillow cases as well. what’s changed?”

No, I don’t have to sleep on the couch but oddly enough this tactic has never convinced her that perhaps indeed we should share the job of ironing the boys shirts.

A friend was in the hospital and would actually be one of their patients for about 10 days. I really hate being in the hospital so I asked for the name and address of the hospital so I could send some flowers.

I don’t think that Mikhail has a problem with bringing flowers to his wife but I was a bit surprised when he asked that I don’t do that. His explanation was that in Russia that flowers are more representative at funerals, and that is not a happy thought. Instead I sent a card.

It was years ago and to be honest even if it was yesterday I am not certain I properly do credit to the sheer size of Oktoberfest. My buddy Greg thought it was a great idea to go there and tip a few. To be honest, I thought it sounded like a great idea. Greg had friends in Munich so we had someplace to crash or the night and if you are visiting from out of town that’s the trick.

We started out the day by going to the Hofbrauhaus. We had something to eat and of course a Maß of beer. A Maß is a pretty big “mug” of beer which is 1.069 liters, 2 ¼ pints or approximately 36 ounces. Little did I know at the time that this wasn’t even a warm up for the rest of the evening.

We did a little a little bit of sightseeing around Munich, not too much as Greg was quite familiar with the city and our goal was to hit a beer tent. That wasn’t much of a challenge and as we went early we ended up in a nice tent with space for all of us. It doesn’t take too many beers before you want to start singing along with the songs being sung in the tent. Not only that but you will want to stand on the benches and pretend you have rhythm.

I didn’t have all that much in the way of rhythm but by this time I was also losing the ability to stand up straight. Ok, it wasn’t the standing that was so much of a problem as the falling down on the other people. I do feel quite sorry for that elderly german couple who was sitting on the bench behind us. I don’t think they were upset the first time I well, sorta sat down on his shoulders, but they were upset by the third. But in order to continue to play with with the others and so I didn’t really fall on someone we spent more of our time sitting down.

It seemed like a great time, and I am sure it was, but all good things must come to an end. I suspect it was well past that time for me as my buddy did make some comment that I didn’t look too good. I guess that was one of the reasons that we didn’t go on any of the rides. I was too busy trying not to spill mustard on myself while eating to bother with the rides.

Despite how bad I looked it was still way too early to call it a night. So my buddy Greg took me to the best place he could think of – a local English pub. He pretty much sat me on a stool with a soft drink and told me to stay there while he had a few more. Well, I have no idea how long we were there but it must have been a quite while because eventually I got myself another beer.