Car seatbelts may be correctly designed for male chests, but in the presence of female ones they tend to slip over the breasts into positions where they really rub against your neck in very uncomfortable ways. I’ve had “burnmarks” on my neck and shoulders from the darn things.
A few years back I discovered these “sleeves,” generally covered in a sort of short-haired terrycloth (I’ve seen them in fake leather too but those work worse), which you can wrap around the safety belts. The sleeve is nowhere near as slippery as the belt itself so in general the belt stays where it should, but not really clingy either so if there’s a pull the belt still behaves normally.
Recently my brother joked “you know, Mom,” (Mom has DDs, making the neck-attack very fast) “according to the Drivers’ Code it’s illegal to place any objects, such as pillows, between the belt and the body. What will you do if a cop gives you a ticket for that, eh?”
Mom glared at him, “first it is not a pillow or anything that keeps the belt from getting tight when it must. And second, I’ll require a female cop!”
SiL and me applauded. No owner of breasts will consider those sleeves as a Bad Thing. The basic design of seatbelts, OTOH, is an invention of the devil. Most men find the sleeves bothersome and take them off if present, but I know two very tall ones who love them (in their case, an unsleeved belt will also try to bite the neck).
This is one of my biggest peeves with Comcast. Not just between channels, but on the same channel for different commercials.
When I’m watching the channels where Comcast sells local ads during part of the commercial break, I always have to jump for the remote when the local ads come on, because the volume is so much higher it almost blasts me out of the house. Usually, the offending commercials are promos for Comcast, but not always.
Is there nobody at the cable company who knows how to read a VU meter?
I have an ironing board that has an iron-holder attached to the broad end. Practical if you have no available surface in your apartment to set it down, but the downside is that it renders that end of the board unusable for ironing. Sure, iron a broad shirt on the end that’s four inches across – you’ve got plenty of time.
I’m not sure that the high volume on some commercials is a design flaw, in the sense that it’s INTENTIONAL. Almost any time commercials come on, I have to mute because the volume goes up markedly. They’re trying to grab your attention for their product. It’s no accident of bad design. Somebody set it up that way deliberately.
I have another one: staircases where the treads are too narrow. People are bigger now than they used to be. I have size 13 feet, and I know a number of people with feet even larger. The stairs in my house (built precisely to code) measure approximately the same as the distance from the ball of my foot to the back of the heel when I’m wearing shoes. The only way I can walk down these stairs is to turn my feet sideways and shuttle down like a crab (up is no problem because the balls of my feet go on the stair and my heels hang off).
The card machine in the laundry room. I found out, much to my dismay, that a replacement card costs a five dollar bill. Not a twenty, with fifteen dollars in credit, not five ones, not five hundred pennies. A five dollar bill. And that’s just for the card (which needs to be replaced every so often, as the machines strip the coding right off), with no credit.
And when you put money on the card, you have to make sure that the card is in the slot before you put money in. Other wise you’ll be putting money on air.
I will get you started on cupholders! My Jetta has cupholders that only fit something about as tall as a can of soda. Any sort of fountain drink or water bottle I have to wedge in there or just hold it in my lap. It’s not like I buy those 44oz Thirst Annihilators either. Sheesh, I just want to be able to stow my hot coffee mug where it won’t burn my crotch and stain my pants!
We recently got moved out of a WWII-era building into a brand new “smart” building. Its IQ is passable but unimpressive.
Doors: not quite the Nelson doors, because the pull bars are vertical, not horizontal. But they’re on both sides of the door, and the doors only open one way. (The pattern seems to be consistent across the building - the doors open into the room - but why do they have ‘pull’ handles on the outside, instead of a ‘push’ plate? Bog only knows.
Bathrooms: have faults innumerable.
The building has “white noise” everywhere. Except the bathrooms, which is the one place I’d be the most grateful for the application of such technology.
The stall doors rest in the fully-closed position when unlocked. (In many bathrooms, including those in our old building, an unlocked stall door would be a few inches open.) This means you can’t tell whether a stall is in use until you go up and either push on the door, or see enough through the crack at the edge of the door to realize someone’s in there.
The bathroom sinks are set into a counter, which is unusable for any practical purpose because people quite naturally drip water all over it.
The paper towel dispenser is set so that you all but have to go through the person using the right-hand sink (of two; almost all our bathrooms are identical, btw, excepting urinals in the men’s rooms v. more stalls in the women’s rooms) to get to the towel dispenser.
We have low-flow toilets (that, in all fairness, almost never jam) which make up for using little water by using it rather intensely. Many of the toilets, when flushing, shoot water well above the rim. Forget the “courtesy flush.”
There are no shelves anywhere in or near the restrooms. So when you stop at the restroom on your way to or from a meeting, what do you do with the assorted papers you’re carrying with you? You juggle them as best you can while you use the toilet and wash up.
Here is a hint, every so often take a razor knife and cut the hair lengthwise along the beater bar. Rotate the beater bar 180 degrees and cut again. You can then just pull the hair right off the bar. No need to disassemble.
That’s why some countries such as Japan, Hong Kong and Korea have laws **requiring ** a shutter sound.
Some cellphone manufacturers abide by this and install a sound that can not be disabled. Not bad design per se, just compliance with the laws in ther largest market. If anything, it’s lazy design - they’d need a different model for use in other countries that has a changeable or mutable shutter sound, but there’s little financial incentive.
To all those with complaints about cell phones, you have to realize that the phone was not designed to be put in your pocket like that. The phone was designed to be used by 12-year-old Japanese girls, and the most important use case is constant interaction. If the phone were constantly either held to your ear, receving and sending text messages, plaing music and video, or taking self-portraits of you and your friends, you wouldn’t have these problems that you seem so intent on creating by using your phone in a strange and nonstandard manner.
There’s a small shopping center downtown that I sometimes shop at. The parking lot is on a one-way street, with two driveways, one to enter and one to exit. The entrance driveway is further down the street than the exit one. This means that every car entering the shopping center will travel the length of street between the driveways twice. I have seen noticeable slowdown when the street and lot are busy, with people trying to exit forced to wait for a large enough gap to pull out into the far lane on the street, since the near lane is full of people waiting to enter at the next driveway. One time I even saw it pretty much deadlocked, until someone waiting in line to enter realized what was happening and pulled out of line to go around the block, and the guy behind the idiot who’d blocked the exit driveway while waiting was smart enough to wait back a bit for the cars to leave.
Hee. Ever have one of those cars with automatic seatbelts? You get in the car, close the door, and a little motor activates and the seatbelt whirs across and belts you in, whether you like it or not?
My old Honda Civic had those. I’m a very small woman, and I was accustomed to it, so it didn’t bother me too much. But I remember having a big guy in the passenger seat, and that thing came across and somehow slapped him right across the adam’s apple. It would also give women passengers an unwelcome and unexpected chest-grope.
They seem to have stopped making those, fortunately.
Heh, I can go one better. My husband’s truck was clearly not designed to hold any drinks larger than a soda can as well. But to top things off, he drives a standard and will hit anything in the cupholders when shifting into second or reverse. It’s possible to have a drink in the left holder while in second gear, but it ain’t gonna sit straight thanks to the gear shift pushing it to the side. Probably a good thing neither of us drinks coffee.
Yeah, I do that occasionally, but it doesn’t work too well for a couple of reasons. I can’t pull the razor along the beater bar because 1) the face plate has a narrow bar across the opening every two or three inches, and 2) the bristles on the beater bar are set in a spiral pattern. So I have to cut a little, rotate a squidge, cut a little more, rotate again, try to get the knife under the cross bar… argh. It’s easier just to take it apart. Don’t get me started on how the hair is forced to the ends of the beater bar and I have to take the damn thing out of the housing to get it off.
To ad a little detail to the deliberateness of this, there are actually regulations in place to prevent this.
Advertisers get around them by applying normalization filters to their audio. It’s the peak levels that are regulated; the peak level of an ad musn’t be higher than the peak level of the program. And they aren’t - meter it and see. It’s just that dialogue in ads peaks out approximately where the gunshots do in the program. All legal like.
People steal the strangest things, including ATM envelopes. More than once, I’ve been at an ATM that had no envelopes at all in the hopper next to it.
Our new ATMs scoot around the problem very nicely by not needing envelopes. Slick bit of design work there - just pop in a pile of checks or cash and the thing OCR scans the checks and provides images of the checks on the receipt.
Re: doors. The outer ones should always open outwards, as per firecodes and such. The internal ones will usually open outwards too, but not always.
My toaster is the ultimate in stupidity. The cord is barely 18" long, for starters. Yes, great if you can both put it on the counter and have an outlet within reach and not have to rearrange the whole damn counter for it. But I had an apartment with no counter space at all. Just a standalone ceramic sink. My kitchen table was the counter, and high up enough that the toaster only reached the outlet if it was on the very back of the table. Oh, and the cord for the toaster comes out the FRONT?! The FUCK? Cords come out the back or, in a few instances, the side, not the front you fuck-faced designer.
And a cancel button? What kind of half-assed convenience is that? If I want to stop toasting, I just lightly press up on the lever. oh, but wait, since you have a cancel button you made the lever lock down when it’s on, so I HAVE to use the stupid button. :mad: