One Small Step for You, One Great Leap for Bathroom Cleanliness
August 4th, 2006 by MarkAs I’ve written before, my school is in the process of finding another teacher. Unfortunately, most of the candidates so far have been woefully unqualified. So, I went into Taibei to put up some recruiting advertisements around some of the bigger Mandarin schools for foreigners.
After that, I hung out with Martin for a bit and went bowling with him and a bunch of the guys from Modawei. While there, I saw a neat sign above the urinals in the bathroom. It said:
請你往前一點. 你的一小步是清潔的一大步.
Who comes up with this stuff? I love it.
:
August 4th, 2006 at 6:49 am
Here’s another similar one with something added to make you take a closer look.
August 4th, 2006 at 7:46 am
That is great! I love the “giant leap” part. In the train station near my apartment, there is a sign above all of the urinals with the same message:「もう一歩前へ！トレイをきれいに使いましょう」
August 4th, 2006 at 10:03 am
I think it was Neil Armstrong
At least it beats the corny (and sometimes racist) jokes above the urinals at McDonalds on Nanjing E Rd in Shanghai.
August 4th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
I assume you’ve seen this…
August 4th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Could I get an English translation? All I see is ??????????? on my browser (of course, seeing the Chinese wouldn’t be any better…) Thanks!
August 4th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
Matt, can’t you even see the pinyin (romanzied Chinese) and English in the pop-up when you hover over the text? Your computer must be lacking fonts or character sets or something. Everything on this site is UTF-8. I hope that helps. BTW, the title is pretty much the translation.
“Please move forward a bit. One small step for you is one huge leap for cleanliness.”
August 6th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Mark: You’re right — I can see the translation when I move my mouse over the ‘????’. I think when you were over here last, we tried to set up my computer to show the chinese characters, but we couldn’t easily make it work. I suspect it may have to do with Window (or Linux) setup. I probably just selected only English and never installed Chinese characters. I bet default installs in Taiwan always include Chinese characters, though.
August 6th, 2006 at 2:39 am
Yeah, in Taiwanese Windows, I’m not even sure if it’s possible not to have Chinese support. Everything’s in Chinese, including the “start” button. I can even type Chinese in DOS mode!
I never had any problem reading this sort of page with English Windows, though. Most of the readers of this blog are outside Tawian, too. I’ll bet if you go to your control panel and look at your regionalization and language settings, you can find a checkbox to click and fix the problem (with a download).