Saran Wrap boxes. Those things are constructed with way too many cardboard tabs, some of which are meant to stay glued in place, and some of which are meant to come apart to facilitate opening and closing or hold the cardboard roll in place. But nothing ever works right and you end up with a box that comes completely apart in your hands every time you try to use it.
Not to mention the razor sharp cutting blade that is almost impossible to position the plastic wrap against but very easy to gash your fingers with.
My office has been “improving security” by which I mean increasing the number of doors you have to badge into along with signs reminding everyone that they have to swipe their badge even if the person in front of you already has the door open.
But several of these doors open outwards, with the badge reader positioned so that it’s awkward to get to when the door is already open. And these are higher-traffic doors, so we frequently have to do this stupid dance around the door to swipe the badge.
One of them was so badly designed that they have, for the moment, given up on the badge reader, and just permanently parked a security guard there who’s supposed to be monitoring everyone who walks through. Mind you, that particular door doesn’t actually go anywhere all that interesting–just to a hallway where every other door other than the bathroom also requires badge access.
A year or two ago I got a free sub to Wired magazine. Despite being mocked from Day One for horrible font/color choices these idiots are still doing crap like putting pink on yellow backgrounds (and you’re lucky if the background is one color). Noticed all the ads were for high end products. I.e., this is not a publication for people like me. So I just let the sub lapse.
I’ve never forgotten the awfulness that was the Summa graphic tablet configuration screen.
Summa made tablets of more or less the same ilk as Wacom and others – an external device you could use instead of a mouse and which was great for artists who were more accustomed to drawing with a pencil or painting with a paintbrush than trying to do so with something that resembles a brick.
The Summa tablet I owned (“SummaSketch”, an entry-level version) had a hardwired correspondence of a given x,y coordinate on the sketch pad and the equivalent x,y coordinate on your computer screen. That, all by itself, should earn it a berth in this museum. A far more natural behavior would be to tap and drag, tap and drag, until the mouse arrow is where you want it on the screen, just like lifting and repositioning a mouse. But no, you had to go to the control panel and enter numbers to get the onscreen mouse cursor to the desired starting point.
So did they give you a pair of blanks into which you could type numbers and hit enter and see where the damn cursor arrow jumped to? Naah…
They gave you this. A scroll wheel for each coordinate. A freaking scroll wheel. So you’d tap the graphics tablet with the pencil tool in the upper left corner, see where that put the cursor on screen, and guess how far to move it. Then you had your choice of tapping the scroll wheels with the graphic tablet’s pencil tool or using your mouse (if you had both connected). If you used the mouse, you got no visual feedback about how far the cursor (as controlled by the Summa tablet) had moved; if, on the other hand, you used the tablet and pencil device, you’d get about three taps and then your cursor arrow would no longer be aimed at the scroll wheel in the ^$#! interface.
The Museum is going to have a restaurant, right? So I have a couple of suggestions.
Just got back from Denmark today. On Monday, in a 7/11 store there, I bought a six pack of beer where the cans had been GLUED together (apparently it’s been around for a little while - here’s Carlsberg boasting about the bastard thing). I don’t know how widespread these are, but I’ve never seen them before; and, yep, each can is glued at multiple points to its neighbours. Then, as the six pack is in a, y’know, refrigerated cabinet, that makes the adhesion both harder and more brittle. You have to apply so much force to break one off I was scared I was going to rip the sidewalls out of the can. I mean, eventually you’re going to wrench one off, and that’s fine just so long as (in it’s now well-shaken state) you don’t actually want to open it. Good luck with that.
Okay, in this restaurant, and speaking of dousing your neighbour - any chance you could get hold of a couple of consignments of those individual milk portions for coffee that came in tiny cardboard packages that you had to rip open?
GM put the LS1 aluminum block V-8 into the 4th generation Camaro and Trans Am. Same engine as in the 5th generation Corvette. But in an effort to balance the weight of the car more to the middle they stuffed the engine way back under the firewall. The same LS1 in the Corvette just sits out front and is easy to work on, because it is an easy engine to work on.
Except for the Camaro and Trans Am. The number 8 spark plug on the passenger side rear is a real bugger to get at. Remove most of the bolts from the coil rail so you can tilt it forward. Then you put the rear most coil rail bolts in your tool box and don’t try to put them back on, just leave them off.
Have many combinations of extensions, and elbow attachments, a garage, another day off, and then go back the next day and finish. And you are going to bleed, because you can’t were gloves in that tight space. The other 7 plugs should only take about a hour.
If buying one of these cars, look the seller straight in the face and ask when was the last time the number 8 plug was replaced. Because it probably has not been.
Our government facility is secured by guards who check all badges. Then to get to our floor you need a separate electronic key for the elevator. Then to pass through the doors you need to swipe a photo ID badge. Then to get into our special conference room you need to pass my desk, where I can eyeball you.
Inside that conference room is a laptop permanently slaved to the projector to show nice big, pretty presentation pages (which people still call “slides” for some reason." to actually USE that laptop, you need someone to put in a password. Only myself, my #2, and the IT folks have that password.
WHY? No unwanted person can get in through all the security, and if they did, are we afraid they’ll “rogue present” an unapproved PowerPoint slide? Why is there a password at all?
How about the labels on the sockets on the backs of black-finish computers & stereo systems? As normally used, those are always in shadow, on shelves or against walls. The use of very-slightly-raised matte black lettering or symbols on the matte black finish makes me think these people are in the pocket of Big Flashlight.
Our custom IT ticketing system (to report troubles & needs) has several long rectangular fields that have can be pulled down to select a type of data. However, you can’t type in these long rectangles – they are only pulldown lists. Moreover, you cannot pull them down by placing your cursor in them – you must only hit the tiny arrow over on the right side to see the selectable list of options.
So…if I cannot type into the box, and the pulldown only works on a tiny area, otherwise doing nothing, why do I even HAVE a long blank white space that looks like something should go into it?
Every time I am fumbling for the tiny arrow that activates the pulldown I contemplate these questions.
The drop-down problem reminds me of a bad design with one of our systems. It’s a financial reporting system, accessed through a browser. One of the functions is to hide or unhide individual accounts and sub accounts, so you can drill down into the data or summarize it on the screen.
This is accomplished by clicking on a little Plus or Minus box next to the account. A task made impossible when mousing over a nearby account generates a popup descriptor, blocking the plus or minus sign you’re trying to click. Gee, thanks guys!
Why does Windows still allow applications to steal focus?
It’s 2019 and this still happens from time to time. There have been countless times when suddenly another app pops up a dialog box, carefully positioned so my mouse clicks on it rather than the intended target, and then it immediately disappears, making me wonder what horrible computer task I just clicked “OK” for.
This happens with keystrokes too, where a dialog box appears and swallows a keystroke, like the enter key or space bar, again triggering something awful like clicking that “confirm erasing my hard drive” button.
A couple of days ago I made a motel reservation on Expedia, only to find out when I got to the motel that Expedia had processed the reservation not for that night, but for November 11-12 which I had failed to notice was the default date when making the online reservation.
There must be some reason for the website listing a default date a month in advance, but damned if I can think of it.
*I did manage to get the November reservation canceled thanks to a nice lady working the phone bank in Latvia.
The bigger question is: Why the hell does this even exist? I would so much rather type in “CT” that scroll up and down and up and down, homing in on “Connecticut.”
2018 Impala, V6. I do my own oil changes. The filter on this one is decently accessible, pretty easy to reach. However, it is mounted parallel to the front catalytic converter, with just about an inch and a half’s worth of clearance. Therefore, I have had to position a blower aimed at the cat for a while after putting the car up on ramps to cool it off enough so it doesn’t scorch my hand. This, out of twenty cars, is the only one I’ve had with the oil filter so close to the exhaust system, let alone the hottest part.
How 'bout changing the HID headlights in my 2010 VW GTI?
The left one isn’t too bad. If you have a child’s hand available you ought to be able to do it. The right one requires taking the entire bumper section off of the car, about 40 screws, along with various other bits and pieces.
The dealer quoted me over $500 to do both bulbs. Part of that is the astronomic cost of the bulbs, but I figured they were double dipping, charging me the book time for the whole bumper routine twice.
No way. I ordered the bulbs from Amazon for $60 each and a friend and I spent an afternoon doing the install. Not necessarily easy peasy, but not $500.
My 07 Subaru had the oil filtersurrounded by the exhaust manifold. In order to unscrew it you had to thread the needle around the hot pipe, and then proceed to try and twist the filter off with your finger tips (Imagine grabbing a glass from the bottom with the base in the palm of your hand). “Just use and oil filter wrench?” HA! not enough room to get the hinge into the space.
The issues with the Museum’s restaurant presented problems which remains legendary within the staff, and rightly so, for it presented truly unique challenges.
For starters, there’s the regulatory aspect. We realized we may have issues when the zoning commission laughed at our proposal to use lead pipes for water transport. I mean… yeah, I get it… but, then it got worse. You have any idea how many poorly designed utensils and appliances have just been outright banned? Who knew that a 1969 microwave would be so dangerous?
Then there’s profitability. Even assuming we could absorb the legal expense, added insurance exposure, and the other cost items resulting from out-of-compliance fixtures… who the hell is going to eat our Jello-Salmon? Our spam and miracle whip sandwiches? Our Chef’s special, Chilled Spaghetti-O aspic and Weiners was only ordered 3 times in an entire week.
So, tragically, the restaurant couldn’t be opened to Museum standards, so we did the next best thing: Put in a combo Taco Bell/Little Caesar’s and let the pro’s get to work.
Do you at least always get them in alphabetical order? I had to buy something from a website today and enter my country twice; the site was in Spanish but belongs to a French company.
One of the dropdowns was in alphabetical order in Spanish, with España between Eslovenia and Estados Unidos. The other one was in alphabetical order in English, with España right between Corea del Sur and Sudán. Dafuq? Does someone know how to say “please make up your mind” in French?
I have found both hot pink and gold nail polish to be my friends. My mother thought she hadn’t heard me correctly when I asked for her brightest, pinkest nail polish (she tells me I was already allergic to pink as a baby), but even she can see the correct port on her router now and she’s got cataracts.
Last I checked Palau was not a state yet it is inexplicably in about 10 or 15% of the dropdowns. There should be only one entry for the letter “P”.
To replace the low-beam headlights in my car, you need to:
[ul]
[li]park the car, & turn the wheel[/li][li]remove the plastic ‘screws’ that hold the wheel well cover in place (make sure you ordered new ones before you begin because at least half of them will be destroyed upon removal).[/li][li]get an 8 or 9 yo (any older & the arm is too large to fit); break both bones in the forearm because it’s not even a straight reach up. [/li][li]Remove collar, untwist lock, pull back housing & remove old bulb. Reassemble in reverse order.[/li][/ul]
To replace the high-beam, which is used much less & therefore burns out less frequently you:
Open the hood, untwist the retainer, pull back housing & remove old bulb.
Why, oh why didn’t they switch the placement of the low vs. high beams to make the more frequently replaced bulb easier to remove.
I’ve got one that hasn’t been mentioned yet; electronic billboards. They need to be on a given ad for longer. Every. Single. Time. I manage to read the top line of something that looks interesting, an upcoming event or a service that I might be interested in it changes to a different message before I get to read the next like with the dates/website/phone #/company name. More frequent switching is not necessary & I don’t know why anyone who pays for these ads don’t bother pulling them as a waste of money.
