Not that you'd know it from a superficial look at their Web site, www.kone.com -- are they ashamed of it or something? :-( You have to dig down a bit to find out anything about their roots; this [link|http://www.kone.com/corporate/main/0,,content=30484&topelem_id=7393&navielem_id=29842,00.html|KONE Corporate Company History, 1933-1987] page is perhaps the best source. As the second paragraph says:

After World War II, KONE was called upon by the Finnish government to contribute elevators, electric hoists and cranes to the war reparations being paid to the Soviet Union. This program forced KONE to expand its capacity, rationalize production processes and learn to meet demanding manufacturing schedules.

Pretty conclusive; the Finnish government couldn't very well be asking foreign companies to contribute to its war reparations, nyet?

As an aside, from the [link|http://www.kone.com/corporate/main/0,,content=30495&topelem_id=7393&navielem_id=29851,00.html|1988-2003] page, you see mention of "its associated company, O&K Rolltreppen GmbH of Germany" -- I think the "O&K" must mean "Otis & Kone"; those two must be much more closely linked than you'd think... Why do I think so? Because so many new elevators (no, Wade, not used ones), in new houses here in the Helsinki area, are so often Otises nowadays -- NO WAY Kone would cede their old near-monopoly on their remote and isolated home market to their biggest international competitor, if that really *were* so much of a competitor! They're in cahoots, somehow.

The word "kone", BTW, means "machine" in Finnish.

...on how you define "tyke". :-)

...Just as I come back here, circumstances conspire to make my presence here sporadic for the next two or three weeks: Remember how I talked about hanging new wallpaper, six months (? IIRC) ago? Anki had lived with the same old boring monochrome grey ones for eleven years, was heartily sick of them, and convinced that "No way we'll get them to put up new ones". So, naturally, here we are, less than a year later -- and the landlord ("Laajasalo Real Estate Co."; city-owned housing (pretty good rent! :-) ) announces they're going to put up new wallpaper in every flat in our house!

The samples they let you choose from are, of course, four different shades of the same old boring monochrome grey... Well, fortunately, after we explained the situation to them, they agreed to let us keep our wallpaper. But they're also painting the ceilings and replacing the flooring (no, Gryge, I'm sure they'll use sensible six-foot-wide swaths of material off a huge roll, not silly little glue-'em-down-one-by-one mosaic tiles), so we've had to evacuate our flat anyway -- actually, we're *lucky* we got to evacuate! You see, they're doing this in a "staggered" fashion, bedrooms first and living room & hallway later. As I understand it, people are supposed to scrunch up and live in just their living rooms first, and just their bedrooms later... I can't see how the FUCK anybody is going to manage that, though!?!

Anki wangled us the use of another flat, just across the courtyard, citing potentially harmful-to-babies paint fumes; this after the neighbour across the courtyard -- next door to our temporary refuge -- recounted how they had got a similar arrangement when their flats were done last year, on account of her husband's asthma... And even after we moved some of our furniture -- including three or four beds, depending on how you count -- over to the "new" flat, our living room is full to the gills with... *stuff*! So how the HECK are people supposed to be able to live that way, even for a week or two? I don't get it... And I don't *think* we have that much more stuff than anyone else.

So, anyway, I'll be living just a few spiteful yards away from my trusty Cable-TV-company 'Net connection for a while. Work was supposed to have been started today, but I didn't see anyone when I dropped in on my way to work this morning, even though I was very late; I left after nine, having spent half the night masking most of the wallpaper so as not to have it all splattered with ceiling-paint. Ran out of frigging masking tape, too, of course, so now I'll have to go buy some more and go home and do the rest.

Most of you would probably be surprised, BTW, at how disconcerting it feels to live in a ground plan that is a mirror image of the one you're used to. Oh well, maybe this is something one gets used to pretty quickly... But still, the feeling of disorientation was amazingly strong.

So WTF is "adhesive", if not a fancy way of spelling "glue"?!?

You lay 'em down one by one -- "we just set them in place" -- and once you put them down, they stick -- "they're adhesive backed" -- so you can't move 'em around after you've put them down.

How the fuck is that NOT gluing 'em down one by one???

The Romans had floors like that, of tiny tiles glued down one by one; the tecnique is called "mosaic". (Hmm... Wonder if the name has anything to do with "the Mosaic belief"?)

But then, they could afford to use stupid inefficient techniques like that -- they had slave labour... And the sensible two-meter-wide roll of flexible flooring material hadn't been invented yet.

But now it has -- and slavery is abolished -- so using inefficient Roman techniques is just stupid.