Thursday, April 7, 2011

The humble elastic band

A picture of my water bottle,
with 2 elastic bands around it.
I usually have this habit of putting the leftover elastic bands from my lesson notes around my water bottle, as shown in the picture. The primary purpose of me doing this is to basically increase the friction of the gripping area.

But a thought just occur to me while I was having dinner with my significant other the other day. The thing that bug me sometimes is how NOT socially aware some of these waiters/waitresses are when it comes to topping up your glass of water. There are the overly-enthusiastic ones, and there are those...well let's just say, they seem to be so expendable.

Anyway, I thought the idea of using these elastic bands around your glasses of water is a neat idea to communicate to the waiters whether your glass of water need topping up...or not. Perhaps we can have a way of telling customers to adjust the level of water that they deem to be the level that they would want their glasses to be topped up! If the water is still above this level, then the waiter wouldn't have to bother about topping it.

Alternatively with 2 elastic bands, we can have a maximum and minimum water level too, that are adjustable according to what they are having throughout their dining experience. So the customer can adjust the max and min level during the opening dishes, and adjust them lower if they think that they would want to make their move. These would definitely help to reduce wastage of water, and more importantly, mitigate the intrusiveness of overly enthusiastic waiters too!

How about that?

2 comments:

Kenneth said...

However, Mr Irfan, how are we going to make it in such a way that the glass still looks sleek, and yet still having this indicator system implemented into this? I would think having two rubber bands slung around your glass during a romantic dinner would be rather... Unsightly? :) I don't have any ideas at present, but i do think its a good idea :D

Kenneth

Irfan Darian said...

Well that's where real design comes in. How can we make such a design workable, and at the same time still won't spoil the romantic ambience that you are talking about. It could probably be embedded onto the glass surface, or it could be part of the design of the glass, or it could just be an etching mark rather than a complete circular indicator...who knows...the possibilities are endless. :D