Feature deletion

The MP Norman Baker became briefly famous a few years back for inciting us all to stop using the standby buttons on our electronics.

The energy wasted on standby was equivalent to three million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year in the UK alone.

Everyone agreed that this was a terrible problem, but what could be done?

Surely, we were all just too fat and lazy to stand up and turn the TV off properly.

Cultura Franca

There is a bogeyman that lives under the beds of all BE students.

It comes out when all the lexis has been mastered, and all the skills honed.

It is a 50-metre wall.

It is a lake of fire.

It is quicksand.

It, of course, is culture.

BELF-U-Like

Rory Sutherland, one of the UK's leading ad-men, tells a great story about how Frederick the Great of Prussia re-branded the potato.

Frederick was very keen for his subjects to adopt the potato in order to stave off famine and stabilise the price of bread, so he made them a compulsory crop.

Frederick's subjects, however, were less keen, claiming they were not even fit for dogs to eat.

They hated the potato.

Despite meting out some severe punishments, the potato, like the 3rd person 's', simply did not take.

So Frederick resorted to Plan 'B'.

The waiting game

Learning a language takes a lot longer than ordering a McDonald's, but the two do share a common problem.

This problem is not McNuggets, or even 'Employee of the Month' posters; rather, it's the problem of managing expectations.

As a fast-food restaurant, what irks customers of McDonald's is waiting.

Generally speaking, you don't wait long at McDonald's to be served, but as you don't expect to wait long, any wait at all is a long one.

As the always-interesting David Maister points out, customer satisfaction bears little relation to reality and is, in fact, the perception of a service minus the expectation of one.