Quality Control Issues

My DH has been in the Middle East before and made some very interesting statements that I'm calling to mind now. He said, years ago, that the buildings and things looked beautiful from far away, but when you got up close, you could see that the seams were misfitted, or that the finishes were ragged. He stated that it was almost like they have the money to afford the fine finishes, but not the experienced craftsmen to do the installations.

As we are sightseeing around Tunis, he will point things out to me that are really finish problems of the same sort. Last weekend, we walked down a long paved pathway. It was 'sand set' brick pavers, about 20 yards wide, with two rows of trees spotted down the lane every so often. Idyllic really. Like a paved alleyway only it had shade built in. Should have been perfect, right? But right in the middle of the path, there was an 8" piece of rebar that I tripped over. It had been nailed flat, bent over so it was parallel to the ground--kind of like what a lazy person does when a nail doesn't go all the way in. Instead of pulling it out, they hammer it into the wood. This rebar was a trip hazard. We laughed about it. In the States, someone with a hack saw would have cut the thing off at or below ground level, not hammered it flat to the ground.

You see that kind of quality control issue all round this town. Case in point:

Check out these coffee mugs. These are provided in the room we are staying in at a five star hotel. The cups are plain white porcelain with the hotel crest emblazoned on the side... sort of.

On one of the cups in the room, the script BL crest is correct. On the second cup, it is a mirror image of the crest. There is only decoration on one side of the mug, the backs are blank. I've put both mugs with the handles facing the same side in this photo, so even if you can't make out the exact tracery of the crest, you can see it's reversed.

Those are the kinds of things that you just don't see in the States. If the Regency Hotel in Dallas opened up a case of coffee mugs that were imprinted incorrectly, they'd send them back for a refund. In Tunisia, you apparently just use them as is.

Quality control is something that appears to have greater strength in first world countries. Maybe third world countries can't afford it?

--Sandee Wagner