The order of things is important in many situations
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
18 March 2018
I was looking for file dividers
(the
sheets of plastic or hard paper that are inserted in
a file to divide its sections for ease of reference)
this week and I made an interesting discovery:
they are printed in the wrong order at least the ones for monthly
divisions.
I was looking for those labelled in
months to help me organise my monthly receipts.
All the ones I could find are arranged
starting with January at the top and
December at the bottom.
Now that might seem like
the right
way to do it,
but it is actually not the best. The January receipts are the oldest and
so they are at the bottom of the file;
followed by those of February and then March is currently at the top of
the pile.
If I use the available dividers,
I will be forced to remove all the January
receipts from the bottom and bring them to the top and then take those
for March to the bottom.
Furthermore:
when filing more documents in future, I will have to first move all the
older ones to one side in order to
reach to
bottom of the file.
If I continue filing
the papers this way, by the time we reach
December, the January receipts will have been moved so many times that
they will have started tearing off.
And no: I cannot simply
reverse their order!
Doing that conceals the month labels since they are printed on one side
only.
I am therefore still searching for properly ordered
file dividers
Meanwhile
I have noticed a similar problem in the way
the
lanes on some of our roads are numbered. Since we
write from
left to right, some of our road builders use the same convention when
marking the lane numbers.
But this can create
a problem when the road reaches a roundabout. Usually, the leftmost lane
is for cars turning left. The next one is for those going straight
ahead; and so on.
If the leftmost lane
is labelled as number 1, what happens inside the roundabout? That lane
does not exist.
The outermost lane
inside the roundabout is directly aligned to the second one from the
left in the straight road. Thus, now, the left most lane is number 2.
When the cars exit
the roundabout, those on the outermost lane (2) end up on the leftmost
lane on the straight road ahead. But now, this one is labelled number
1.
So, the driver
starts in lane 1 then finds herself in lane 2 and back to lane 1
again! This must be very confusing for learners and their trainers. It
probably also explains why so many motorists cant keep in their correct
lane when negotiating the roundabout.
To avoid this
confusion, the lanes should be numbered from right to left. That is, the
rightmost is number 1 and so on.
That way, on a
four-lane road, lane 4 turns left at the roundabout. Inside there will
be three lanes numbered 1, 2 and 3 from inside-out.
When the car in lane 3 exists the round about, it will still be in lane 3 on the straight road.
QED!
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