Thoughtless Acts

1)  A student in a cafe uses two hardcover books, propped up on the raised abutment at the end of the counter where he's eating, to keep a stiff, old paperback from closing while he reads it.  Presumably the abutment was designed to keep cafe customers from accidentally pushing their food off the counter's back edge onto the floor (the counter faces a window, and there's a small gap between the window and the counter's edge), but it is the perfect height to provide leverage for this student's improvised paperweight.  As a result, the student can keep his hands free to eat without having to stop reading.

One possible way to make this kind of improvisation unnecessary might be to include a small "ledge" at the top of the abutment that could push down on the book's pages.  Although I suspect most coffee shops probably don't want to make it easier for people to read in them for hours on end.

2) Maybe not quite "thoughtless," but in this picture a pizza restaurant uses the large screws securing its counter abutment to the wall as an improvised theft-prevention device.  Oregano and parmesan cheese shakers are tied with bungee cord to the screws behind the counter (as I could not get a good camera angle on the screws themselves, the photo just shows the shakers) to prevent customers from walking off with them.  Kind of sad that so many businesses on Telegraph have to worry about people stealing oregano (Blondie's uses a similar setup), but it's interesting that Berkeley residents seem to find so many creative uses for counter abutments.

One possible alternative would be to keep these condiments in a larger dispenser (like the kind used for ketchup and mustard at stadiums, but modified to dispense dry condiments) that would be too cumbersome for thieves to carry away.

3) Mostly a joke: I made the name of my Thoughtless Acts folder a reminder of the assignment's due date.  Consider this my meta-homework. :)