Having a couple or three hours to kill while down at the Aomi wharf
today, I decided to spend the time at the Museum of Emerging
Technology, or whatever the hell the name of the place is.

For those who have never been, it is definitely worth your while to
give it a look while you're in the Odaiba area. Especially so if you
can do it on a weekday, when the place isn't crowded.

One of the nice things about the museum is that they have obviously
made quite a bit of effort to include English explanations on the
exhibits. More than the standard lick-and-a-promise one encounters in
some other places, and which makes you wonder why the hell the
bothered at all. And in addition to paid staff, they have quite a
number of volunteers on hand.

Naturally, many or most of these people have put a good deal of effort
into being able to provide explanations of the exhibits in English.
And they seem to be quite pleased to have an opportunity to put their
studies to practical use. This is a good thing, and I am the last one
who would bitch about it.

But....

When you enter the place, you buy your entrance tickets from
touch-screen terminals. Terminals much like the ones you might find on
ATMs. The screens are in Japanese by default, but there is a place you
can choose to switch to an English menu.

I walked in, walked up to the machine, dropped my 500 yen in the slot,
and was just about to poke the screen to tickle my ticket out of the
machine when out of fucking nowhere Speediko Yamamoto-Gonzalez runs
up, extends her arm beneath my own, pushes the "ENGLISH" option, and
without so much as an "Andale, andale, ariba de gozaimasu!" was gone
again.

I don't mind when people automatically give me the English version of
the brochure, even though they almost never contain all the
information in the Japanese one. I don't mind when staff want to
address me in English. But Jesu-fuggin-Christo can't they at least
wait until a gaigin looks befuddled before offering some kinds of
help?