The Blinking 1200 People
I was alerted today to the above pejorative that the youngest generation uses to refer to my (and older) generations. It refers to the kind of folks whose houses you walk into and find a multiplicity of appliances reliably, faithfully, accusatorily blinking “12:00″ because their credulous owners ran to Best Buy or Circuit City or, if poverty of geography and circumstance and lack of the ability to make basic moral distinctions dictates, Walmart, and purchased something they thought would improve their lives and endear themselves to their grandchildren, only to be confronted with a cruel thicket of arcane and incomprehensible operating principles. (Was that a sentence? Judges?)
I make my living in technology, so I am not the sort of troglodyte who fears to assay a piece of equipment or software and engage it on its own terms. But I have become impatient with technologies that refuse to conform to some sort of intuitive set of expectations. I have a car stereo that I still cannot adjust on the fly, in the car, because its interface is so arcane that I need the manual to adjust the treble level or speaker balance. Even then, the manual is written in such a shorthand, because its meager number of pages must accommodate 3 or 4 languages, that much of its information is in the form of iconography instead of English text. This might be ok if there was a standard, or at least congruous, set of icons for basic electronic musical functions, but NO! Each vendor seems to have to develop its own set of icons, and I’m reduced to trying to adjudicate between “that’s a snake eating a rat” and no, it’s “a usb cable being plugged into a generic peripheral that just happens to have rodent-like characteristics”.
So, if your maiden aunt is unfortunate enough to belong to the flock of nuns that I run down in a crosswalk while trying to get Antibalas or some equally worthy musical number adjusted just right for the drive to my favorite watering hole, blame not me. Blame the inchoate miasma of technological design. And don’t set your watch to anything digital in my house.
