Of Tea Trays and Cup holders...

["John Wiltshire" <John.Wiltshire@domain.elided>]

Karl Doll has stolen my thunder with his gag about cup holders.  I was
going to suggest that the tea tray was there to compensate for the lack of
cup holders in Alfas...  :-(

The tea tray saga reminds me of a true story that I heard some years ago
when I did postgrad design studies.  For one subject, we used to have a
different guest lecturer each week that was a professional designer and who
would present a fascinating case study on their work.

One of these lecturers was an industrial designer who had been commissioned
by Eveready to design a new Dolphin torch (in the days when such things
were made in Australia).  On the day that they were to present to Eveready,
they had some last-minute concerns about how the battery would fit into the
case, so a hole was carefully cut in the bottom of the prototype model, the
access checked and a patch was glued in place and painted.

Eveready were duly impressed with the design, and rushed the new torch into
production.  Thousands of these torches were made (I still have one), all
with a raised square moulded into the bottom of the case - Eveready had
prepared the tooling thinking that the patch was part of the design.  Maybe
a similar story could explain the tea-tray?  "Never attribute to malice
that which can be explained by stupidity!"

Alfa content - I visited my 164 this morning.  It's straight, painted,
shiny and ready to be re-assembled.  With any luck this will be an Alfa
weekend!

Cheers,
John Wiltshire
Sydney Australia

If you have received this email in error, you are prohibited from reading, 
copying, distributing and using the information.
Please contact the sender immediately by return email and destroy 
the original message.
**********************************************************************
--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided