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!