Me, many years ago, doing a little dance in front of the doors at Future Shop to catch the sensor to open them automatically…until I saw the “PULL” sign on the door. (But seriously, why the hell didn’t FUTURE SHOP have automatic doors?!)
My first road trip in my Jeep after learning how to drive, coming home from a city 2 hours away. Windows open, car still sweltering hot. Just outside my city’s limits - “Duh. I just realized I have air conditioning.”
I’ve had my Jeep for almost 2 years now. The other day I noticed a spot in the dash where the word “Cruise” would light up. I didn’t know I had cruise control and don’t even how to use it.
My “ghetto blaster” (remember those?) wouldn’t record a tape one day. Went and bought a new one. New one wouldn’t record the tape either. I was all, WTF?! until I realized that the little square had been popped out of the tape to make it so you can’t record over it. Sheepishly returned the new one…
My gf just got a new (used) 2010 Subaru. I drove her to look at the car and she liked it, purchased it, and drove it home. We had lots to do the remainder of the weekend, so I never checked out the car.
Two weeks post purchase, she decides to take me for a ride. I’m sitting in the passenger seat and my ass begins to feel really warm. This progresses to really hot. When I realized there was no way this was just my imagination, I told her I thought her car was on fire!
She pulled over. Eventually we both realized she has heated seats and the passenger side was “on”. Dealership never mentioned it, and I was her first passenger.
Drove an old Jetta for about five years before realizing the manually operated driver’s seat could be moved up/down, rather than just fore/aft and adjusting the back tilt.
What makes this extra pathetic was that the seat design and seat function were almost identical to an older Audi I drove for years, and for which I loved the height adjustment feature on a manual seat.
For an extra dose of pathetic, I am a car guy and know VWs and Audi’s have similar lineage and design features, not to mention that general knowledge of German cars would lead one to expect such an adjustment feature would be present.
Ha! Philster, I have driven my Prius for two years and didn’t find out the seat went up and down until a couple months ago when a friend drove it and adjusted the seat. I got in the car — went WTF? — and called him up to demand, “Can you please tell me why I’m sitting in the floorboards??” :smack:
Also, my Prius doesn’t have a button to push to lock and unlock it, you just touch the door handle. This feature, and the card-reader at work, which I keep in my purse and just wave at the sensor, has led me to believe that any door I approach will just magically sense my presence and open. Har.
Also, tdn, my iMac (which we got last December) has a card-reader, right below the slot to insert a CD, a fact I only discovered this past Sunday.
My niece couldn’t get her iPhone to ring, it only vibrated. I thought, hey, piece of cake, I’m a techie. Dammit, I couldn’t get it to work! Went to the Apple store – hey, there this little slider thing on the upper left-hand side – slide it and it only vibrates! (You’d think there would be some indication of that mode when you’re in settings.)
This one I still haven’t figured out – on my car stereo (Acura, but I’ve seen it in Hondas, too), there is a label on the 5 and 6 preset buttons that says “Disc -” and “Disc +”. It’s a six-disc changer. However, when you’re in Disc mode, the 5 goes to disc 5 and the six goes to disc 6 – what do the Disc -/+ do? I can’t figure it out.
Good guess. I figured that’s what it did to. However, if you press it while playing disk 3, it goes to disk 5 or 6, depending on whether you pressed disk+ or disk-.
On all cars? I haven’t noticed this on the budget-level French and Japanese cars I’ve owned.
Does your Volvo have separate demist and defrost settings? Or does it - like a number of other brands - have a setting that works for both demist and defrost? If demist=defrost, there’s a pretty good reason for turning AC on with defrost. Especially if the AC compressor doesn’t kick in at subfreezing temps.
I haven’t driven a Volvo in ages (can’t afford one), but my comment was to the fact that both the French and the Japanese cars I’ve owned (four brands in total) turn the ventilation system virtually to zero before the engine warms up. And in wintertime, that’s a pretty safe recipe for misted up windows, so to be able to see where I’m driving, I have to control the AC manually. When the engine’s heated up, the automatic control system works pretty OK, but not when it’s cold.
Those labels are there for controlling an external device, not the 6-disk player itself. I’m not familiar with the actual stereo you’re talking about, but I am guessing it’s for a trunk-mounted multi-disk changer, or an MP3 player of some kind (which really should be “folder +” and “folder -,” but that’s another discussion).
Yeah, I finally did a real search, and after many confusing message board posts it appears that those buttons are for either:
A separate CD changer, mounted below the seat or in the trunk
Controlling your iPod (through some iSomething connection)
The folder buttons (for scrolling through folders on your mp3 discs) are separate, but probably won’t control an iPod. Confusingly, the manual says that they will switch to the next disc in the in-dash changer, but that’s just not true.
Anyway, mystery solved, I suppose. Now, what happens if I press this “Eject” butto…aiiiiiiiiiiiii.
I was having a party at my house one day and a friend arrived late in his shiny pretty Porshe Boxter. He foolishly tossed me the keys and another friend and I went to get ice.
Driving back to the house she reached up above the rear view mirror to a black button which for some idiotic reason she pushed. Luckily we were approaching a stop sign and I was slowing down as she discovered that it was the button that released the hard top. She managed to hold onto it until I stopped and we reassembled his car before returning to the house.
Oddly he let me drive again after that, but I don’t think I ever let her be my passenger again.
I have an HP monitor I bought two years ago. I loved it when I got it, but shortly after it started looking horrible. Text was aliased with harsh outlines, and graphics were grainy. Just…deeply unpleasant to look at. I fiddled with settings both monitor and PC, adjusted cleartype a hundred times, etc etc etc.
A week ago I discovered that it was all due to the preset in use – the monitor was set to “Game” mode, which locks sharpness at max. Switching to ANY other preset (graphics, text, general) immediately made it look 100x better. On text mode, it’s now one of the easiest-to-read-on monitors I’ve ever used.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a total duh moment, but I’m both a computer technician by trade and do graphic design and write as hobbies, so I can’t believe I lived with it for almost two years when it was a ten second fix.
OK, think about it this way. Why doesn’t everything in your refrigerator freeze solid? The system is plenty capable of getting cold enough, why does’t it freeze?
The answer is there is a thermostat to prevent that from happening. Well in a car AC system there is a device to prevent the evaporator coils from getting too cold and icing up. If the evaporator gets cold enough, a sheet of ice will form over the top of the evaporator and all air flow will stop.
Every auto air conditioner made has something to prevent the evaporator from getting too cold. The control might be mechanical, a pressure switch or a pressure sensor, or a temp sensor, but I guarantee you every system out there has something to prevent the evaporator from getting too cold which would cause icing of the evaporator. Depending on design somewhere around 26-28F is about as cold as you would ever want an evaporator to get or risk icing.
So if you start up the car that is stone cold at -10F even if you command the compressor to engage, the built in safety or safeties will not allow the evaporator to do anything, on many cars the compressor won’t engage until the pressure comes up, on others the compressor might engage, but no refrigerant will flow.
Most system that use pressure to regulate evaporator temp usually won’t engage until the refrigerant temp is about 45F. These systems cycle the compressor on at about 45F and off about 28F This keeps the evaporator at just above the temp where ice will form. That is as cold as you can run an AC system.
So at -10 you are roughly 38 degrees below the coldest the evaporator ever gets on its own, and 55 degrees below where the compressor will engage.
Not sure I understand what you are talking about here. Defrost is the term for the fan driven heater that clears the front window. I have heard demist used for the electric heated rear window, but this usage is very uncommon here in the US. I don’t recall ever seeing a car where if you engaged the front defroster, the rear window defroster also came on.
I had to read this one about 4 times before I understood what you were trying to say. Yes if I leave the system in automatic and start the car up cold, the fan either does not come on or comes on low until the coolant starts to warm up. Blowing ice cold air into the cabin does not warm it up.
I would note that in automatic the air is probably being blown at your feet.
However, and I suspect your cars work the same if I select defrost the fan comes on right away regardless of coolant temp. On my personal car if I start the car when it is very cold, I won’t get any air until the coolant reaches 70F, the the fan ramps up. If however I push the defrost button I get full fan speed with the air blowing at the windshield.
The toaster at work has a “bagel” button, which I just found out makes only the center coils of each pair of slots heat up, so you can just toast the cut sides of a bagel. It had never even occurred to me that you’d want that for a bagel, so I never knew what the button did.
I was not helped by the fact that the old toaster had a bagel dial that went from 0 to 10. I guess so that you were covered if you were toasting something that was only, say, 30% bagel.
Ya know the two hooks on a vacuum cleaner that you wind the cord around? The top one could be turned around, and I always wondered why, as I patiently unwound the cord, one loop at a time…
OK, this one wasn’t me, but it’s so funny I have to share.
One morning as I’m pulling into the parking lot at work I see this woman standing next to her car, and the car’s hazard lights are flashing. I park and grab my laptop bag and am heading towards the door but she flags me down. As I’m walking towards her car I notice that she is frantically flipping through her owner’s manual. She tells me that she turned her hazard lights on somehow and she can’t figure out how to turn them off.
As I lean into the car I say something like “Well, there should be a button somewhere with a big red triangle on it… yep there it is” and push the button to turn her hazard lights off. She was so grateful for my help, but all I could think was “WTF?” If there is any single button that is standard on every car that’s been made in the last 25 years, it would have to be that one with the big red triangle in the middle of the dash. How can someone not know what that button does?