h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

PH? people who refuse to change the subject??
My shoes were perfectly secure, but the amount of pain meant I wasn't tackling much off road. Looking forward to resuming normal activity<star

PH - hotel cooked breakfasts that consist of

"A" bacon
"A" sausage
"A" egg
"A" tottie scone
"A" daud o haggis.

Looks silly. Breakfast has to have at least two bacons

Surely "a" bacon would be a whole pig's back.

Slidey engaged / vacant signs on doors. Where I work people usually slide them to engaged when they go in but leave them when they come out. You can't trust the sign and end up opening the door to see if the sign is telling the truth.

And drinking water out of a ceramic mug. It's just not right.

PP.

When I saw the reference to 'Slidey engaged/vacant signs', I immediately thought of bolts on toilet doors (which often slip so that they aren't an indicator of the cubicle's status). Not something you would want to open to check if the sign was true!

Talking of toilet doors PH, why do they use red/green to indicate engaged or vacant when red/green is the most common form of colour blindness? Depending on which survey you believe, roughly about 10% of us won't have a clue whether or not a cubicle is occupied without actually trying to give the doors a little push. Despite this, if you go into a loo and try and see which doors are unlocked you get strange and even occasionally aggressive looks as if to say, 'Can't you see which ones are unlocked?' To which the answer is 'no'.

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Good point, BB, and not something I'd ever thought about as I'm not colour-blind. What other colours could be used? Black for engaged, white for vacant, perhaps?

Black and white works well (you can't really use other colours as there are other forms of colour blindness, such as Blue/Yellow) but potentially someone might argue that distinguishing it along black/white lines is racist...

You could just keep it simple and have a big tick if it is free or a cross if not.

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Most of the toilets I have been to recently have red and white.

They could put a window in the door so you tell at a glance

"...potentially someone might argue that distinguishing it along black/white lines is racist" That would be the kind of person who, some years ago, argued that 'blackmail' was racist and should be replaced by 'demanding money with menaces'. Yeah, right!

"Most of the toilets I have been to recently have red and white." I don't know where you are, TC. I've only ever seen red/green where colours are used.

"They could put a window in the door so you tell at a glance" I did think of that one, very tongue-in-cheek, but I decided to leave it for somebody else to post. I didn't have to wait too long. Thanks, sa.

I think our ones at work are red or neutral ( lock/door colour).

"They could put a window in the door so you tell at a glance"
Trying to put a positive spin on this idea....I supposed you'd know immediately to stay away from cubicles with steamed up windows....

The window isn't such a bad idea. You could have a small window instead of green/vacant, and an opaque surface instead of red/occupied.

I know a lot of people who prefer 'covering noise' when they use a public loo, so they might appeciate the additional facility of a loud stereo playing outside the cubicle. Suggest your own inappropriate music by all means (water music, chart music (well it's cr@p, isn't it), but I'd say ambient sounds, like crashing oceans, might be best.

Wouldn't it be a torture if you are desperately waiting for a free cubicle while listening to the sound of a waterfall blaring out at you?

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Really petty hate: The number of people who appear to remember Christopher Lee only for Saruman and Count bleedin' Dooku.

I'll be watching The Wicker Man and The Devil Rides Out tonight.

Well those are the only things I ever saw him in, apart from a... less than stellar Dracula movie....

I think it bothers me because some of these people are going on about how they're such huge fans of his... it's like people in the late 90s who harped on about how they were huge Manic Street Preachers fans but only owned the latest album (I'm not much of a Manics fan, but it seemed like a good example).

There's a number of actors I've seen comments about 'best known for…' which certainly isn't what I knew them from.

I suppose you can be a fan of a particular piece of work someone's done, without necessarily knowing & liking everything they've done?

Regarding Christopher Lee, not his best film, but what about Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun).

Petty Hate: predictive text. My tablet would have had Christopher Lee starring in The Man with the Golden Retriever.