What to Grumble About. Or Trivial Complaints for Saturday.

This will be fun!  The curmudgeon goddess gets to talk!  Usually it's the goddess of gloom.

First complaint:  Imagine getting in your car early in the morning, ready to drive to work, and someone has changed all the dials around and the gear-stick is now on the other side of the driver's seat.  You get a little message when you power on, telling you that all is now "new and improved."

That never happened to you?  Well, it's happened to me three times during the last week, but not in the car.  At my computer.  The people who change things around never seem to put any weight on the problem I've tried to clarify with the above parable:  Learning is a cost to the users, and changes in the system should take that cost into account.

Second complaint:  How microwave ovens and other domestic gadgets are designed to make cleaning as impossible as possible (heh).   The designers never did any cleaning?  The designers have large investments in the toothpick and Q-tip industries?  The designers hope that consumers buy another product when the previous one is full of gunk and goo?

Here's another (though trivial) reason why we need more women in design, not because there's anything gender-essentialist about women and cleaning, but because women are more likely to have cleaned such gadgets in the past than men and more likely to have to clean them in the future, sadly.  This article gives you more reasons for getting more women in the STEM field.

I don't get why consumers don't rise up and demand gadgets which are cleanable and which last longer.  Those would be better for the environment, too. 

Third complaint:  I don't have a third complaint today.  But one needs to count to at least three to get a listicle!  And listicles are the new face of online journalism.  That might work as the last trivial complaint.

Have a complaints video: