The above photo is of me at age 22 when I lived and worked as a science teacher at Weill Cornell Medical College in Doha, Qatar, a small country that is a peninsula off Saudi Arabia. I carry many stories from my time here, but one is relevant to the conversation. That story is the time the apartment tower I was living in caught fire with me in it.

I lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment complex with two towers and a shared base. The trash chutes collected to a common area in the basement. I was sitting in my room one evening when a loud voice starting yelling in Arabic as if through a bullhorn. This occurred seemingly randomly and constantly. I do not speak Arabic and, as a result, had no idea what was being said. My inclination was to remain in my room. I stayed in my room for about 20 minutes before deciding I needed to go the hallway of the apartment to determine whether I needed to leave the building. I opened the door to billowing smoke. A fire had broken out somewhere in the building. I crawled to the exit stairs. The stairs were too hot to crawl on. Instead, I ran down twelve flights of stairs through smoke and out of the exit as quickly as I could. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. We were even able to return to our apartment the next day because the fire had engulfed the opposite tower only. We later learned a tenant in the opposite tower had thrown a cigarette down the trash chute, which caught the basement on fire. Apparently, many individuals delayed leaving the building for the same reason.

The tower had been built for the Pan-Asian games a few years prior. All the tenants at that time spoke Arabic. However, few-if-any current tenants spoke Arabic. The most reasonable solution to prevent this from occurring again would have been to change the language of the fire alert from Arabic to English or some combination of languages and to educate the tenants on the proper way to identify a fire in the building and exit safely. Instead, the building management hired individuals from Nepal, all of whom suffered from what was and still is an abusive environment for laborers, to sit on plastic chairs with air horns in the hallway. They were instructed to blow the air horns in the unlikely event that another fire broke out. These poor individuals had to sit in the dark, because the hallways lights are motion-activated, and the management would not keep the hallway lights on. This was a kludgy, incompletely effective solution that reflected what management had (i.e., inexpensive labor).

Kludgy solutions are common in facial aesthetics as demonstrated by the following examples.