Trust me, it’s way easier to flip the switch than to climb under my desk and fuss with cords.
I haven’t seen a monitor with a really inaccessible pretty switch, though.
Well, if it was good design they’d probably still be in business.
I’ll go with a classic I don’t think has been mentioned yet. Stovetop burners laid out in a rectangle, control knobs laid out… in a straight line? WTF?
I have lived with this design for the last eight years, and I still do not know which knob controls which burner.
Mine is some of that vaunted German “engineering” that VW is so keen on.
In US and Japanese cars, the battery is hooked up with a black cable for negative/ground, and a red one for positive. Pretty universal I’ve found.
VW, for some inscrutable German reason, decided to make their positive cable black, and their negative cable a weird brown color. So me, thinking “black = negative/ground” managed to hook up a new battery backward and blow some sort of master relay that cost me several hundred bucks to get replaced. I know I should have checked the actual positive/negative symbols, but again, black has always been negative/ground on EVERY car I’ve ever had or helped work on, which is somewhere near a dozen or more at this point.
Why VW couldn’t go with the damn standard the rest of the US car making world uses, I have no idea. But I do know it cost me a couple of hundred bucks to find out the hard way.
It could be worse.
I have a fancy Whirlpool range in my rented apartment. Relatively nice stuff, not bargain basement. But not something I had any hand in choosing.
4 burners arranged in the traditional trapezoid with the two front burners somewhat outboard of the two rear burners. And with 4 knobs in a horizontal row on the raised vertical backsplash-style control panel. So far so ordinary. But with the outboard-most knobs controlling the back = inboard-most burners.
WTF, over ?!?!?!?!?!
I can’t even blame Chinese designers for this since the design center is in the USA. The factory is in China of course, but it’s not their fault they’re building insanity. Ohio did that to them.
I always thought that “Red = Hot” was universal, but it’s not.
The console between the seats in my husband’s truck is trimmed with chrome. Whenever I ride with him, the sunlight through the windshield will suddenly strike it at just the right angle to shine a beam of light smack into my eyes. It’s blinding and painful. I usually drape something over it. Husband says it never happens to him, but he’s nearly always wearing sunglasses.
Logitech wireless keyboards - more of a stupid packaging design than stupid product; in the box, a wireless keyboard and mouse - the mouse has a little storage hatch for the USB dongle that is required to connect them to the computer. The dongle isn’t in there. It’s secured in the cardboard box, under the flap at one end (which you have a 50/50 chance of seeing depending which end you open) - quite a lot of people open the thing, put the mouse and keyboard on the desk, then throw away the packaging, only to later try to set up the keyboard and mouse, and discover they are missing the hidden dongle.
For the mouse I just bought, the dongle was inside the mouse in a secret compartment. No indication in any of the packaging that it was in there. I had to google it.
My contribution to this thread is two cars I’ve owned that don’t have an off button for the audio. You have to mute it, or turn the volume all the way down to not hear the radio. I told the Chevy guy “wow, that sounds like a real design defect.” He swore they did it on purpose. I can’t imagine why.
Of course, on our Tesla, there isn’t even an off button for the car.
I’ve got an HP printer, and my internet provider changed a few months ago. There appears to be no place on the HP website to change my password and my old username. They say there is but none of the options they provide allow for changing that basic info. Buttons and icons galore, just no “new internet name/password” switch. GRRRRR
I have a 2017 Subaru Crosstrek. To change the clock there are two buttons next to the clock, one is marked + and one is marked -. So you just have to push the correct button to either go forward (+) or backward (-). Easy peasy. My husband has a 2016 Subaru Forester. I sat in a Walmart parking lot for a half hour trying to figure out how to change the time in that car. It has what the book calls paddles attached to the underside of the steering wheel. It takes a series of pulling and pushing the paddles to get to the clock and then more to change the time. Makes no sense at all. I told my husband to just leave it alone, eventually the time will be correct again. He’s finally figured it out.
That’s in order to drown out the grinding noises from the transmission.
I have a 2019 Crosstrek, and it has some really stupid product / software design in it.
It is impossible to set the clock manually. It has a manual mode, but I have never been able to find the buttons that will make it work. The only way I can find to set the clock is by pairing my phone with bluetooth, and starting the Subaru app. It won’t work if the phone is plugged in through the USB, it will only work if the phone is in wireless bluetooth mode, Apple Play or Android auto is not running, and the subaru app is.
It’s annoying as all get out.
I’m curious as to why a change in your internet provider made you decide to change your username on a website?
Did you get a new email address? I’m asking because I still have a couple of usernames that are my first email address that I dropped years ago. I simply changed the email within my profile, while keeping the same username.
It was the name of the account. Used to start ATTXXXXXXX when ATT was the provider, now it’s just my initial that identifies the account as mine, plus a brandnew password.
A funny update, sort of. My brother had recommended HP because they have a fabulous ink-replacement system, state of the art, blablabla, so I went with HP. Today, I told him my sad story and he goes “Oh, my IT guy says to pitch anything HP sells into the garbage and get any other brand.” Thanks, bro.
These last few posts remind me of poor design that I’m positive is on purpose.
Two years ago, I changed my domain name. Which in turn means I changed my email address.
For years, I used Kaspersky Safe Kids parental control software on my daughter’s computer. I updated my email address with Kaspersky when I changed my domain. Last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I decided it was time to stop doing business with Kaspersky (a Russian company). I logged into their website and discovered that deleting my account entirely was an option. The cost of Safe Kids was only $15 per year, so even though I had just paid for the year a few months previous, I decided I didn’t care and went ahead and deleted the account.
Fast-forward to November. I got an email from Kaspersky, sent to my current email address, that they would soon be auto-charging me for another year. WTF? I looked into it online, and it appears this is a little scam Kaspersky has going. One would think that by deleting your account with a company, that this would signal to them that you are no longer interested in their product. Or that any kind of auto-renewing should be killed along with the account. Not so with Kaspersky! If you do not explicitly turn off auto-renew, they will keep charging you.
Of course, the account was long gone, so I couldn’t log into their website to turn off auto-renew. And here’s the kicker: the fine print in the email says to contact them using a form on their website, from the email address you created the account with. That email address was longer gone than the Kaspersky account.
There is no other way to contact them that I could find. No email address, no phone number, just their hokey web form. I filled it out anyway, explaining that I no longer have an account with them, and no longer have the old email address, and so on. Do you think I ever got a response?
Come December, they went ahead and charged me for another year. I knew it was coming, and I was all on fire to have my credit union do a chargeback, but then I kept putting it off, and finally decided it wasn’t worth the effort for $15. The expiration date on my bank card is this month, so I’m hoping come this December when Kaspersky tries to charge me again, it will fail. If not, I guess I’ll have to get off my ass and follow through with doing a chargeback.
Here’s one for you and, if you can explain the thinking (if any) behind this design, you will win a prize from me!
My apartment complex has private laundry facilities, which is really nice. The design mystery lies within the model of dryer that they have. As you know, the job of lint filters is to filter out the lint from the laundry, so they are usually set down it filter holder. When you are done drying your load, you pull the filter, clean it, and return it firmly to the holder, which keeps it separated from the laundry.
The lint filters in these dryers are actually exposed to the laundry! So as the laundry is drying and the lint is being filtered out, the tumbling laundry is brushing against the expose filter and picking up some of the lint that was filtered out! What IDIOT designed that?! Pray to God that he hasn’t moved on to building bridges or buildings! 
I will jump on the anti-HP bandwagon…
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I’ve had to create an HP account to enable printing. Drivers are installed, Windows sees the printer, but can’t print until you create an account and register the printer.
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Slightly different model: could not perform the step in 1 unless the PC and printer were on the same WIFI network. They were connected to the same network, but it HAD to be wireless.
Requiring you to create an HP account is a bullshit requirement. That’s one more reason I’m not likely to buy an HP printer.