My Addled Brain

I finally figured out why I hate the company microwave.

As part of my recent return to all things webby, I picked up a few books. Well, OK, 6 books. I’ve started on what I think will be the most facinating one of the bunch - The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman, a rather interesting (from what I’ve read so far) treatise on why simple things should not be difficult to use.

Seems Norman has had issues with doors. And refrigerators. And light switches. At first, he blamed himself for these problems - what kind of idiot doesn’t know how to use a door? But then, he looked at how the door presented itself. All the doors he had to deal with opened in different ways - they opened inward, they opened outward, they slid into the wall. But all these doors looked exactly alike. How can you tell? What’s the big secret? He came to the realization that there was none - the problem wasn’t that he could no longer reliably operate a door handle, but that the doors themselves weren’t presenting the normal visual cues one might use to know exactly what direction to operate the darn thing in the first place.

Which brings me to the microwave at work. It’s got the standard numeric keypad, as well as a prominently displayed Start and Clear buttons. But there’s well over a dozen functions that surround the start button, none of which seem to serve much purpose, as far as I can tell. But one of them is the Time Cook button, which allows you to do what most people do with a microwave, which is set a time to cook the item you have placed inside it, be that oatmeal (which I eat most mornings at work these days, the Madre will be happy to know), a wounded GIJoe figure about to succumb to the tortures of his Cobra captors, or that damn cat. Whatever it is you nuke, you typically set the time and go. Most microwaves I have used allow you to either push the prominently displayed Time button, enter your time, push start, and voila! Microwave radiation pummels your selected item with electrons, bringing them to an “excited” state, and warming the contents. Hell, some microwaves don’t even require the Time CooK button, just enter your time and go! It’s almost magical, isn’t it?

Well, I’ve used this microwave for two months, and more than half the time, that damn Time Cook button hides out among it’s rather useless compatriots, impossible to see, so that Warm Chicken and Popcorn can stand up alongside it’s one truly useful function and cry out “NO, I AM SPARTACUS!” at me every morning. It’s like the designers got so caught up in adding so-called “Convenience” buttons that they forgot most people don’t give a rat’s ass about them. Designers keep looking forward, adding features and abilities that few want and even less need, all in the myopic name of progress. Well, if this is progress, somebody get me a bonfire and a cast iron skillet. I’ll rough it, thanks.

I’m just barely into this book, and already he’s got me nodding my head at some of the utter inanities of things. I never quite realized how much time I’ve wasted in my life just looking at a telephone at various places I’ve worked, institutions I’ve attended, not to mention hotels, just trying to figure out how to dial a local number. I’d recommend it for reading to all of you, but as most of you are currently in shock that I can do this much typing at one sitting, I’ll forgive you if it slips your mind.

And if that’s not shock enough - it’s review time! Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

ES makes Being
John Malkovich almost sane.
But damn, it’s so good.

And Kate Winslet…rowr rowr.