Aside to Certain Readers (you know who you are).... True, I did more or less give you permission to use the contents of my recent Info Highway Cliche' Kit column, so I can't really complain that you posted the whole thing to the Internet, though it did torpedo my ongoing negotiations with Reader's Digest. In the spirit of that column, here's a free factoid that you may find useful in constructing one of those abstruse references that make you the life of any party.
A flat-iron was once called a "sad iron," based on an archaic use of the word "sad," meaning "heavy or dense." I leave it to you to figure out how to apply this, but you might think about the recent fortunes of Digital Equipment Corporation. Sad iron.
Long before Don Norman discovered that Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles, Rust Hills, the onetime fiction editor of Esquire magazine, addressed himself to the subject of how things ought to work. He did this most memorably in a book entitled, How to Do some Particular Things Particularly, or The Memoirs of a Fussy Man; and in some fussy sequels.
I particularly like the essay, "How to Set an Alarm Clock." It turns out that there were, back when he wrote the piece, five steps to remember in setting an alarm clock: Set the clock, set the alarm, wind the clock, wind the alarm, and pull out the little knob so the alarm will go off.
Thank goodness we've simplified that interface. My alarm clock needs adjustment only if the power goes out, the time changes, or I want to get up early (each of which happens about twice a year).
Sometimes I think that fussy feedback is just what we need in user-interface design. Then again....
I don't suppose the clock makers were responding to feedback from Rust Hills when they made clocks easier to set. It's possible, but somehow I doubt it.
Hills invented a system for remembering the five steps in setting an alarm clock. But when clocks came along that let you wind clock and alarm at the same time, there were only four steps. And with electric clocks, there were only three. His system no longer worked. So he adapted it, pretending to wind the clock and alarm and preserving his five steps, some of which became, for some clocks, virtual steps. He would twist an imaginary key, calling out "three!" or "four!," driving his wife crazy.
Users will do the stupidest things and have excellent reasons for doing them.
It turns out there are an awful lot of clocks in my house and yard, and I relearn just how many twice a year, when the time changes. It always takes me a week or so to find them all. In the meantime, the sprinklers and pool filter are coming on an hour early or late, the computers are timestamping files wrong, the kitchen clock is giving bad advice on how much time we have before the lunch guests arrive, and forget about the dashboard and guest-room clocks, which I always do.
I've worked it out, though. It turns out that the whole clock-setting process consists of exactly 14 steps....
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