Swamped by Google

[neuropteris]

Luckily my customer was Turkish and didn't understand, unluckily the MD who saw the fax did!

Also have the occasional problem with language from my non english speaking customers. One of my favourite tales is of a Spanish lady called Maria

Neuropteris : "hello Maria how are you"
Maria : " ok but I am constipated"
Neuropteris "your constipated?!? (thinks she must have got this wrong) What are your symptoms?"
Maria : " my nose is blocked and I cannot breath"
Neuropteris : "thats not constipation Maria"
Maria : " what is constipation?"
Neuropteris explains constipation
Maria : "I WILL NEVER SAY THAT AGAIN!"

In case you hadn't guessed she meant congested.

 

[Tintenfisch]

Heh, sounds like a few of the papers I marked last semester... some of my favorite sentences were:

‘… the organic maters decomposed were decomposed by bacterial.’ [sic]
‘Worms are more suited to living in polluted and silly water than any other organisms.’
‘So some insects are not tolerant of pollution whereas others are not.’
‘Vegetation coverage was minimal, with lots of sunlight shinnying through onto the stream.’
‘Quadrat counts are used extensively on plants, because they rarely run away when being counted.’
‘There are lots of methods have been used for the study of distribution of species in the universe.’
‘The methods were used, was applied to compute the snails and then make some statistics to analysis the data.’

 

[sorseress]

So that kind of stuff happens Kiwi-land too?

 

[DHyslop]

Gawd, it sounds like my Geo 210 class...

One of the grad students gave a geology outreach presentation to a group of kindergartners a couple weeks ago. He came out of it telling us that they're smarter than the freshmen are.

Dan