Either he's covering his butt, or he has memory issues.

[ShadowTiger]

That story gives me shpilkis in my genechtagazoink.

I got this image in my mind when you said that. :P Jay Sherman, O infamous film critic, we miss you.
Oydle oydle deedle Oydle oydle deedle, Reubein Milakhem Schplukhus! I tried looking for the clip of when he said that, but I can't quite find it.

EDIT: ... Damnit, I can't. I can't ignore it. I have to. Reason #5232 why I miss that show.

[Pagan]

Allow me to explain. Jews who strictly observe Kosher dietary laws, such as many of my cousins, will have two refrigerators and two separate sets of dishes, and they must be kept separate. Kosher law forbids combining meat and dairy on the same plate, and many Jews will simply keep separate dishes and separate fridges, one for meat, one for dairy. I know this sounds odd to non-Jews (I'm Jewish and it sounds odd to me), but that is the custom.

I always thought they made sense considering when the dietary laws were set down. I know that there's other meanings, too, but what with the conspicuous lack of refrigeration, it makes sense that they were also trying not to kill themselves with bad foodstuffs.

[Shalom]

SC: You made me these keys yesterday and they don't work. You should learn to make better keys so people don't have to keep coming back.
I pick up the keys and look at them, and discover they use a very different blank. It hurts my keymaker pride to see such a travesty take place.
Me: *shocked* ... ... Okay, firstly, hello. ._O' Secondly, I enjoy making keys and am sure I wouldn't make a mistake like this. They're clearly two different blanks. I would've seen it.

Cool, another frum keymaker.

I had something of the sort happen to me once. Woman comes in (whom I have never seen before) and demands that I remake her key that I cut wrong. I take one look at her key, and I know immediately that I didn't make it: the bow says "True Value Hardware" on it, which is not me. All my keys had my stamp on them, which said "A-Guard Locksmith" at that time.

I kept trying to tell her that there was no way on earth that I could have made that key, as I don't have access to True Value's wholesalers, and that she must have made that key at the hardware store up on 16th Street or somewhere, but she kept on asserting that I'd made it, and that I was a Damned liar and would be going to Hell for it.

I actually enjoy making keys for whatever reason, and do tend to remake keys outright when they don't work, after throwing away the old ones, or grinding them down so they can't be fixed into a working key. I get the suspicion that they come in with functioning keys, tell me they're broken, and only give me the original key and a receipt to make a copy of as they have the new spares at home.

Then I'd say "Oh. If you have the ones they made for you, I'll take a look at them and see where the error is so I would best know how to fix them or remake them for you. Otherwise I might just make you more keys that don't work for whatever reason, and we wouldn't know why they wouldn't work. Come back with the duplicates and I'll be glad to make this right."

What he said. When I was doing this full-time, I was proud that my keys worked first time, every time. This really is something to be proud of, and you have every right to be.

(I had people coming to me from all over New York City to make keys for them, and once all the way from Philadelphia for a key by code. That one astonished me, I asked him how come he couldn't find a locksmith in Philly, and he shrugged and said this was where the rental agency sent him. This was back in 1989 when the double sided Chrysler keys had just hit the market and nobody knew what to do with them yet.)

I had no problem recutting keys that were miscut, especially if it was such an egregious screwup as using the wrong keyway. But I always took back the no-good ones. Who knows, maybe the machine went out of adjustment. (Not likely, I kept them accurate to 0.0005".) But the main reason was to prevent this sort of fraud. It's only nickel and dime, penny ante stuff, but I just didn't want to be taken advantage of.

We did tell customers that copies of copies weren't guaranteed, especially if the original was very worn out, or looked jagged like it was cut with a hacksaw or was otherwise ugly. People didn't get this. They'd come in saying that the key we made didn't work. I say lemme see the original. They say Oh that one doesn't work either, and we'd pull our hair out. My boss used to tell them it was like a Xerox machine; you photocopy something illegible, you get something illegible.

In some circumstances I was able to get a working copy from a non-working key, but I definitely needed to know in advance.

A perfect example of the above is my Irish Catholic friend who used to clean residences in New York. She had a very amusing situation one time, where she was hired to clean up a particular residence. Without anyone telling her anything other than that the place needed to be cleaned, she went in and did her job. Apparently too well. Because, seeing two different cabinets with dishes, she realized the kitchen space could be made far more efficient if she merely combined the two cabinets into one.

Now, I know a whole bunch of you are thinking, "....and?" But you see, that's the story. And that is the part of the story where every Jew reading this or hearing the story smacks their hand to their forehead and goes "D'OH!"

Allow me to explain. Jews who strictly observe Kosher dietary laws, such as many of my cousins, will have two refrigerators and two separate sets of dishes, and they must be kept separate. Kosher law forbids combining meat and dairy on the same plate, and many Jews will simply keep separate dishes and separate fridges, one for meat, one for dairy. I know this sounds odd to non-Jews (I'm Jewish and it sounds odd to me), but that is the custom.

Many families have four sets of dishes: meat and dairy, one set each for year-round and for Passover. (Although in my experience the Passover dishes tend to be mismatched hand-me-downs from the grandparents, who got them from banks and movie theaters. I GENERALLY use plastic plates on Passover if I'm eating in my own house, which doesn't happen often.)

It's more common to have two stoves than two refrigerators, although I've seen folk with both. Me, I just have two sinks, and I don't cook meat and dairy at the same time so the steam won't combine. The refrigerator is OK to have only one if you're careful to keep everything covered and don't spill stuff on other stuff.

(I do actually have two fridges, come to think of it, but the one in the basement is mostly for storing leftovers; it's not for kashrus purposes.)

So naturally when my friend made the Jewish kitchen "more efficient" by combining everything, the woman of the house freaked. Because it meant they would have to throw away ALL the dishes and buy entirely new sets.

Not exactly. Simply mixing them in the closet wouldn't necessarily make them non-kosher, unless there was no way to tell them apart. (We always get two different patterns for meat and dairy for this reason.) It just meant that she had to drag everything out of the cabinets and sort them back into their respective places. Not a disaster, just a pain in the neck.

Now if she washed the meat and dairy dishes together, especially if it was in the electric dishwasher, that would have been a major problem.

But my friend had the perfect defense: "I'm Irish. I wear a crucifix that I don't hide. What part of my Irish last name or my visible crucifix makes you think I would know anything about Jewish laws or customs?"

My friend still got paid for the work she did.

First thing I ever do with a new cleaning lady is go over the basics with her. These are meat, they go in this cabinet; those are dairy, they go in that cabinet. Meat stuff gets washed in the right sink with the red sponge, dairy in the left sink with the blue sponge. Etc. And if you're not sure what category a particular pot is in, leave it aside and ask me; I'd rather find an unwashed pot than one that's been made non-kosher. I'd say that if the customer failed to do that, she's at least partially responsible for that mixup. OTOH if she communicated this to the office and they didn't pass the info on to the cleaner, then that's their fault.