Dear plasterer eating fruit on the subway:
If you're going to leave the pips on the train, at least drop them on the floor instead of leaving them on the seat next to you.
Dear mother of twins:
I see that you have two babies, most likely through no fault of your own, and I get that you need a stroller that can hold two babies. The problem is that your stroller is so wide that it doesn't leave enough room in the supermarket aisle for a shopping cart to pass. When the store is crowded like during evening rush hour, this messes up traffic flow in the whole entire store. When you are in an aisle, no one can get past you in either direction. You're going to have to either a) get a narrower stroller, perhaps one that has the kids one in front of another instead of side by side, or b) leave the kids at home or with a sitter while you do groceries, or c) go shopping during non-peak times. Seriously. I get that strollers and childcare are expensive and you have shitloads of things to do on very little sleep, but you're inconveniencing literally hundreds of people with that behemoth.
Dear Flash fetishists:
If you present the content of your website as image-based Flash only rather than as text, it won't get indexed by Google. This means that when the translator working on your annual report thinks "Surely all this shiny happy stuff about their history and mission and values has already been done in carefully-crafted English by their talented corporate communications people" and then goes googling to save herself some time and you some money, she will get zero hits. At this point she would be perfectly justified in translating it herself, which means you will be paying the translator to do what you've already paid your communications people to do, and the translator might (perfectly rightfully) make different choices along the way. However, if your translator is a stubborn little shit like me, she won't take zero google hits for an answer and will plow through your sea of flash until she finds the information in question. However, since your Flash is image-based instead of text-based and therefore can't be copy-pasted, you are still paying the translator's hourly rates to retype all this stuff when it could have been done in 30 seconds of copy-pasting. It's essentially advertising copy about how awesome your organization is, why not make it easy for people to find it and repeat it elsewhere?
2 comments:
Borrowing your tradition of focusing on the least important part of a post...
If you're going to leave the pips on the train, at least drop them on the floor instead of leaving them on the seat next to you.
In the US (in the NE US, anyway), we say "pits". I saw "pips" when reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries as a kid, and I didn't know what they were. The only pips I knew was short for "pipsqueak," and that didn't work in context.
So Canadians say "pips"? Hm.
In other news, I'm kind of glad to know that people do this here, and not only in NYC. It's disgusting, but I'm relieved.
As you can see, I am monstrously behind (work has been so busy, thanks to so many people being fired), so expect a ton of comments.
Pips isn't actually part of Canadian English. In this case I was either using a deliberate briticism like I sometimes do, or it was a typo - I forget which. We say either pits or seeds depending on the fruit, and I now forget what exactly the fruit was.
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