Patronizing a restaurant with only a few customer

Often when given a choice of 2 or more restaurants for a meal I would patronize the one that is less crowded or even the least crowded. The thinking is not about avoid crowded places but more of supporting a struggling business and I have always been disappointed! If a restaurant serves good/great food it will be more likely to be busy than not. I would frequently provide suggestions for improvement for these places and had never made a difference! A typical example is as follows. There is this pie store at a food court where I used to have lunch several years ago. Most of their customers were foreigners as pies are not a Malaysian favorite. A pie lover myself I gave them a try and was not impressed. Like a food critique I spoke to the manager offering him what I belief would make a good pie. His pies were dried and sold without gravy, ketchup or sauce. He thank me for my comments and a minute later he came back with a bowl of chili sauce! This store closed not long after that.

I have given up thinking that I can make a difference to these people. My random support once or twice will have no impact on their bottom line and if they have the ability to improve with a couple of comments from a customer or two they will not be in such a position.

Do not ask a Kurd to do the work of a Jew

I heard this story from Mushtak Al-Atabi, a colleague from Iraq and Dean of the School of Engineering at Taylor's University College. He was using this as a means to explain how he got the "burnt mark on some of his fingers!" It seems that this is a true story too.

Movie subtitle in Iraq sometime ago was supposedly controlled manually. In other words, it is not part of the movie and someone had to watch the movie and change the subtitle accordingly. The story goes that there was this cinema where a Jew was doing this job. Unhappy about his pay he quits after he was unable to get a pay rise and the owner of the cinema replaced him with a Kurd. For one reason or another this new replacement were not doing his job properly and the subtitle was not in sync with the movie and the audience started hurling abuse at him. Frustrated with the abuse the new subtitle-man started an argument with the audience. It was so bad they had to stop the movie and the owner of the cinema, in his quest to control the situation, apologized to the audience saying that he is to blame as he has given the job of a Jew to a Kurd.

When my family moved to our current residence a few years ago, we redesigned the whole kitchen and had a set of new kitchen cabinets and tops installed. Happy with this vendor's work, we asked them to design and build our shoe cabinet at the entrance. The person told us "we do kitchen cabinets and don't know much about shoe cabinets!" Thinking that it would be cheaper an easier to go with one vendor than to source for another and beside, how different can a shoe cabinet be? We now have a fairly large shoe cabinet where it can't hold shoes. One is in danger of being struck by one of my wife's heel when opening that cabinet. Similar to asking a "Kurd to do the job of a Jew," one should also not ask a kitchen cabinet maker to do the job of a shoe cabinet maker!