A gas station nearby (which has a “points” deal with a grocery chain’s shoppers card) “upgraded” their pumps a few years back. The new pumps, for some reason, would not accept the shopper’s card or alternate ID (phone #). If you wanted to use your shopper’s card for the gas discount, you had to go inside. BUT if you went inside to pay, you had to pay a set amount, you couldn’t just fill your tank. So you basically had to guess how much gas you were going to put in.
The kicker though, was that they had these stickers on the pumps explaining how you had to pay inside to use the shopper’s card, sorry for the temporary inconvenience. It was two years before they finally got the pumps working right. (I actually started filling up at another station across town near where I work, because their pumps would take the shopper’s card.)
On the Netflix series “F Is for Family,” a character invents a mug that turns the same color as whatever liquid is poured into it. His heart sinks when another character asks “You mean like clear glass?”
Hah - that reminds me of a time when I was looking for an over-the-door hook.
Amazon offered assembly service for it.
Here’s my latest one: At pretty much every major medical facility here, you have to sign in using a kiosk.
First name - there’s an OK button right by the alphabetic part of the display.
Last name - ditto.
Birthdate, last 4 of phone number: the OK button is far away, at the lower right hand part of the screen.
Every time I go, I waste several seconds look for that.
Saturday I went to Best Buy to get a new mouse. I don’t care about it being fancy, and I want it corded. They had the perfect mouse for $9.99. At the register, on the payment screen, the question came up if I wanted to buy a three-year extended warranty for $19.99. I didn’t say anything but looked at the cashier, who gave me a sheepish grin and shrugged. Which makes me think he had no control over such a stupid question coming up.
Samsung TV. Every time it’s turned off I have to search for the CC (closed captioning). The TV turns it off. I need it back on. It keeps changing where it is, and the damn icon for it.
I think I have it sorted out, but bet it changes next week.
LG TV’s, ‘magic’ remote. If you hit one of a few, very easy to bump, buttons or jostle the remote in just the right way, a cursor pops up on the screen that’s controlled by the remote (like a Nintendo Wii remote). It’s awful, I hate it, I can’t stand it, if I knew about it beforehand, it may have pushed me to a different brand. I know lots of people like it, but I don’t. I’m just not able to control a cursor like that so it’s flying all over the screen. To get rid of it, you hit the zero button, but that also basically registers as click so you end up selecting something nowhere near what you were using the directional buttons for.
But my real problem with it is that there’s no way to disable it. There’s a few tricks/hacks out there but IME, they don’t survive a power cycle.
The only real solution I’ve found is to replace the remote with one that isn’t ‘magic’.
To be honest, if it was just bumping one or two different buttons that caused it to pop up, I could deal with it, but certain types of motion trigger as well and since I tend to hold the remote while I’m watching TV, it happens a lot.
I replaced the remote on my LG TV with a universal remote the day I got the TV, because I want to control all my components with one remote. But I did encounter a “magic” remote in a house that I was renting, and yeah, it’s pretty awful.
Not the stupidest, but a “Why on earth did you do it that way?”
Cable company issued new boxes with remotes. The new quasi-universal remotes can operate our TV and the box, which is a nice convenience.
But the On/Off switches at the top are “TV only” and “TV and Cable box together”. Since the actual process is an exclusive “OR”, it’s annoying when they get out of synch. If someone before me has been watching the TV with Roku, or the DVD player, I have to turn the TV off, then press the TV and Cable button if I want to watch news or something.
Definitely in the first world problems space, but I can’t imagine what advantage they expected from this design.
I’ve run into that problem with HDMI CEC. It’s the feature that allows one device to control others. For example, when I hit the power button for the TV, it shuts off the receiver and DVD player as well. Like your example, sometimes things get out of sync and I have to turn things off/on in the right order to get it straightened out. Not really that big of a deal, just an annoyance.
I have a cheap bluetooth speaker that I sometimes use when traveling, to listen to music, audiobooks, or podcasts from my phone. After it’s been idle for a while, it turns itself off, but it announces that it’s doing so by playing a LOUD sound, thus waking me up if I’ve been playing something to fall asleep to (and rendering it useless for that purpose).
I have an IR temp gun that times out after a few minutes and always startles me with how loud it beeps when it does so. And, keeping with the stupid designs, you can turn it off manually, thus avoiding the noise, by holding down two of the buttons, which also happens to be the button combo you push to change it between C and F. That means it takes two hands AND it you have to change the units back. I can’t think of any reason why they didn’t make it able to be powered off by holding down a single button. It’s not like it’s that big of a deal if you turn it off by accident.
I thought our clinic was the only one with this stupid setup. UGH, it makes no sense at all to all of a sudden switch how you enter info. Every time I have to do it, I forget that part.
When we first got these docks at the office around 2018, one of my coworkers put a tiny potted plant on top, without knowing about the Giant Power Switch. Took him a while to figure out the problem. I still have the same model on my desk, I’ve inserted some thin objects under the Giant Power Switch so I won’t trigger it by mistake. (HP eventually modified the dock, newer models are a solid block without the Giant Power Switch.)
I’ve got some ear buds that my wife bought. She doesn’t like them. I understand. I do wear them when mowing grass. The on/off switch is pretty much the entire back of the thing. Phizo electric or whatever. It’s touch sensitive. So, when you try to adjust the fit, you often turn them off/on. I DO have to touch it to adjust it in my ear.
Got another one. The stupid oven beeps every 5 minutes to tell you that everything is A-OK.
No attention needed. No timer set. Nothing. But it must remind me it is cooking. I KNOW. I’M THE COOK, NOT YOU. I started you and turned you on. Shut the hell up.
Programmers, listen up. I’m a programmer. Just because you can, does not mean you should. Stick that on a note on your computer.
Here’s an unfortunate blast from the past that I’ve been reminded of due to some computer archeology at my in-law’s.
The jumper setting label on Samsung IDE drives is printed backwards to the orientation of the actual jumpers on the drive, so you need to do some mental rotation to figure out exactly where to put the shunts.
Here is some ascii art. the oooo represents the power connector, the middle |:::::| is the header block where jumpers/shunts are attached to change the settings, and the additional :::: is the data connector.
The label has a little picture showing the arrangement of connectors, and then diagrams showing where to put jumpers to change the settings.
Label arrangement:
|oooo|:::::|::::::::::
When the words on the label are rightside up, the order of connectors on the drive itself is reversed.
Actual drive:
::::::::::|:::::|oooo|
Not too terrible if you just need to jump the two pins closest to the data connector, but you also have to jump the bottom two pins nextto the power connector, which are actually the top two pins.
Just to be sure and make it difficult, neither the label or the drive shows which is pin 1.
I have an app that lets me call numbers in the States and Canada. It’s cheap, only $5 and while it’s not unlimited, it gives me more than 1,500 minutes a month.
The stupid design is that while using the app to talk with someone, and I get another call in from the phone or another app (such as Whatsapp, LINE, etc), it mutes the current call and gives priority to the other call.
Other apps let you know you have a call and decide if you want to accept it or not.
I may have ranted about this a few times already, but I think a good candidate for bad design is the Play/Pause button. You know, the button that you press to make the music start, and that you press again to make the music stop.
The Sony Walkman and similar devices had separate Play and Stop buttons. But on the first MP3 players and iPods, there was no motor involved so let’s just call Stop “Pause”; and somebody decided that a single button could be used as a toggle to do both. It worked well on those devices that only had one purpose.
Then RealPlayer, QuickTime, WinAmp and Windows Media Player all adopted that because everybody needed to catch up to the iPod. Since this was on a screen, they decided to fluidify the icon on the button: a Pause symbol if the music is playing, and a Play symbol if the music is stopped. And then came Netflix and Roku and Audible and every device and application in the 21st Century. And all the ways buggy software and spotty connections can mess things up where you have a Pause symbol while it’s not playing, then you press it and who knows what’ll happen.
I want a Stop button that stops the music, and a Play button that starts it. But it’s too late: there’s a whole generation of tech consumers who wouldn’t even know how that works. The Stop button has been uninvented.