Not one design, but too many: paper towel dispensers in public restrooms. Some feed when you wave your hand. Others require you push a bar. Others want you to pull on the towel. It’s often difficult to see which is which.
Oh, and try turning on the water! Wave your hand under the faucet. In front of the faucet. In front of the sensor hiding behind the faucet. Wave it at the right speed and pattern, too. Or maybe you push down on the top of a handle – towards the back of it, towards the front of it, or maybe it’s a circular thing. Does it shut off on its own, or do you need to push it again? Or maybe you still turn a lever. One lever, or two?
Sometimes nothing seems to work, and I feel like a bad wizard, waving hands around, who can’t get the spell right.
I find that if I hold my hand such that if the water suddenly started it’d be deflected onto my shirt & pants works nearly every time.
I was in the habit of diluting the last of the shampoo with a bit of water and using more of it to compensate. I used to say that by the time I threw away a shampoo bottle you could drink from it. I can’t even get the caps off anymore.
I’ve noticed that various rest areas in Minnesota seem to have one or the other: manual faucets and automatic hand blowers (not towels), or automatic faucets but hand dryers where you need to press a button, but not both of one type or the other. There must be a state regulation of some sort.
Good point. Air dryers are pretty simple – if it has a button, press it; if not, hold your hands under it. But faucets are confusing. The sensor is in different places; the other day it took time to realize the sensor was at the bottom.
Snap on caps being a perfect example of stupid design.
Stupid for who? If it facilitates quicker manufacturing with less sophisticated machinery and / or saves 2 grams of plastic on each bottle, it’s a smart win for the manufacturer.
One problem with the sensors at the sink is some work poorly at sensing both darker and very pale skin, just like the same issues the No No laser hair remover had when they were developed.
Interesting. I should try to keep track of whether I have more problems in late summer, when my hands are darkest, compared to late winter, when they’re lightest. (I don’t think I ever hit “very pale”; but then I never get to “really black” either.)
FWIW, both the sink and the towel dispenser at the library I was at yesterday afternoon worked nicely and immediately for me.
I have never heard of the No No laser hair remover.
I remember Neil deGrasse Tyson grumbling about that.
It’s a facial hair remover (rotary blades) for women.
It’s far from THE stupidest product design, and maybe someone here’s already mentioned it, but I feel like at least 50% of packaging marked “tear here” does not, in fact, tear here, and leads to either not tearing far enough - losing the little cutaway notch to ‘start’ the tear, and forcing you to rip it open some other way - or tears too far and destroys the resealable ziploc function of the bag.
It appears to involve neither blades nor lasers, but a heated wire. Think I’ll stick with my epilator, which was a whole lot cheaper.
If you can stand the pain an epilator is more effective as well.
We have a Brother ink jet printer that just constantly clogs, and hasn’t printed a decent page for a couple of years. I keep struggling with it because the thought of taking a perfectly good printer with duplex printing, scanner, copier, FAX, and every other feature you can think of to the landfill bothers me. But every time I try to use it I have to go through cleaning cycles, test prints, yada yada. And it’s never fully cleaned and leaves faded bands across the page.
In the meantime, there are still HP Laserjet IIs in service printing perfectly, and they were last built in the 1980s. They even still make the toner cartridges for them. Now that was a GOOD product.
Here’s an oldie. How many of you remember trying to break the Popsicle twins in half without one or both breaking into pieces? And no one wanted the broken one. They stayed with that design for a long time. I feel like I was still trying to break them apart for my kids in the 80s!
Just got home from the orthopedic specialist. Upon check-in they handed me a tablet that was running the absolute worst software in kiosk mode, allowing me to fill out those endless medical questionnaires electronically. That’s a win, right?
The initial questions were spoon fed a page at a time and they provided only a tiny text field for things like lists of medications and prior surgeries, all to be fat-fingered in using the terribly laggy keyboard.
If you click the “back” button because you made a mistake, the entire thing resets to the beginning and forgets all of the information you entered.
Best of all, when it gets to the actual list of questions, it shows something like “Mother” then two questions like “Hear condition?” and “High blood pressure?” with a big “Next” arrow…
What’s the catch? It turns out that the list of “Mother” questions is actually 20 or 30 questions long, but there is no indication at all that the list scrolls. The questions are shown in large font in kiosk mode with no scroll bars or indications that there is more, but with a big arrow to go to the next page. Unless you use your finger to scroll down, you will never see the remaining questions, and they are optional, so the app will happily let you go to the next page.
If anyone actually cared (or could do anything about it) I would have explained to the staff that it might be worth looking at why every patient only answers the first two questions on every single page, leaving the rest blank.
If anything, this kind of device is not very usable by many people with temporary or permanent disabilities–like patients at an orthopedic specialist facility.
As an IT professional in the pharma industry, this kind of laziness in application design is inexcusable. I would not allow an application like that out the door on my watch!
What memories! I guess if I wanted to split one, I’d keep the wrapper on and do a two-fisted move. Trying to split them once they were out of the wrapper always left one stick with half of a piece.
I always thought of those as a sneaky way of claiming the box held e.g. 12 servings when it really only held 6 double-servings. The second stick was essentially decoration. Or more accurately, camouflage for their true intent.
Much like the large Snickers bar that claims it has 100 calories per serving. Which would be true if you ate 1/4th of it like the fine print suggests. Yeah, riiiiight.
But yes, your overall point stands. Trying to break one of those evenly in half always invokes memories of Rocket J Squirrel intoning: “But that trick never works!”. And, like Bullwinkle, we keep trying anyhow. I can recall crying as a kid when, as always, half of one half split off and landed in the dirt or beach sand, and the other 3/4ths was attached to one stick. I wasn’t squeamish about eating sandy or dirty popsicle, but it was just difficult to filter out all the gunk in your teeth, ruining what’s supposed to be fun. Mom on the other hand often foiled those re-use plans
I had to laugh at the thought of actual printer “smash parties”, but I guess they’re a real thing. Here’s a gift article from WaPo dated 7/10/2023