Pet Peeves

It takes a lot to get me going. You've probably noted that things like bureaucracy (telcos in the unregulated era - from back in Wimsey days are a prime example - see very early Digital Rags)  and taxation without representation (aka the blank media levy) are just a couple I've written about in these pages.

This month I'd like to share with you some (ok, lots) more of my Pet Peeves and get them off my chest.

I'll start with the ignorant people in this technological society. You know them; those who simply don't know about the little gadgets that make our life go forward on a day to day basis. Most of you know about the people with tape over the blinking 12:00 on their VCRs, but I'm not even talking about them. I'm talking about the people who drive up to a computer controlled intersection where there are buried loops in the road, visible as circles or rectangles of tar, and they stop before they get to the loop! What do they think the circles or rectangles are there for anyway? Of course the converse unfortunately is also a peeve; the engineers who put in the loops with a nice long left-turn lane and then set the computer to expect the cars too fast over the loop. Only when everyone in the line tailgates within a couple of feet past the loop will the whole line get through. One slow-starter and the light cycles to red and we all have to wait another cycle.

While we're dealing with the road, how about the people at the crosswalk? They walk up to the button and press it; and press it; and press it. Even when they've watched someone else push the button before them, they still do it again themselves. Now I'm not sure whether they are actually ignorant of the fact that the computer only needs one button-press to know there is someone there, and that it is ignoring all the rest, or that the social scene simply requires that they can't just stand there. Same thing happens in elevators - and in most cases there's even less reason for people not to know the yehudi has already been awakened; the button lights up on the first press.

Those two peeves came to the top because I see them every day. The buried loop characters get me because I, like most people in the urban traffic scene today, am a lot of the time a bit late or impatient when I'm driving. I see someone do something that might impact how fast the light changes, and I wish I had a bull-horn to tell them to move forward a few feet.

Another category of peeves affects me every day too, but it is buried much deeper in my life and most people probably don't even think about it.

I've been in and around the computer industry for over 30 years, so I've watch it evolve to what it is today. The problem I have is that, in some respects, what it is today is not nearly as useful in some ways as what it was before the PC grew windows and a mouse. My peeve is with the "dumbing down" of the user interface to computers, along with the "featureitis" of today's programs. 

Don't get me wrong, I love windows (note the small w - I'm talking about things like X-Windows and the Apple MAC and such as well as MS stuff) and a mouse. I'm using both right now, and in fact probably have more windows open on my computer desktop than 99% of the people who use computers today. I use a Logitech track-ball instead of a mouse on my main system, but I couldn't do without it.

The thing I'm peeved at is the evolution of many (most) programs away from keystroke-oriented commands towards drop-down menus accessed via the mouse; especially when the menus don't have keyboard short-cuts. The featureitis is the cause of the lack of keyboard short-cuts. Too many options for any reasonable key combination coupled with the lack of incentive for programmers to even bother with them since "everybody uses the mouse anyway". The mouse and drop-down menus help people "get up to speed" with the program and the menus help remind people of all the features they should be using. The problem is that the gain in getting up to speed is at the cost of a slower top speed once you get going. Getting up to speed with a program used to take some people a week or so. I wonder how many man-weeks have been lost by lowering the training time to a day or even an hour? Seems to be a false economy in my opinion.

The point of all this is that the imposition of the mouse into the user interface has actually made many day to day operations less efficient and both the purchasing public and the software writing industry are conspiring to continue to make it worse. Note: I just pressed <ALT-F><S><ENTER> to save this document - much faster than moving my hands from the home row over to the mouse.

Anyway, onwards and upwards - the computer industry is certainly not alone in having aspects that got onto my pet peeve list.

Let's go back to the roads for another peeve. It rains a fair amount around here (Vancouver BC) and this plays havoc with the way the lines on the road look at times. The silly thing about it is that in their own way, the road engineers have figured out a wonderful way to make the lines stand out in the rain, and even when it's sunny; they erase them! That's right, the places where the road has been realigned and had the lines moved typically show the old lines better than the new ones. They've been ground off with a machine. The problem is that the grinding exactly matches where the paint used to be, and not just the paint has been removed. An amount of the road has also been removed and this causes the ground-off pavement to be rougher than the surrounding areas where the lines used to be. In the wet, and at night, these rough areas fool the eye because they stand out better than the white lines do. A better way would be to erase them by grinding in a random pattern and destroying the straight lines of the original, but of course that would cost more!

I don't know why, but many of my pet peeves seem to center around my driving. Maybe that's because I generally enjoy driving, but get a bit miffed when I see others either not doing it well, or doing something while driving that irks me. A case in point is the driver who, despite the fact that their car came with an ashtray, shakes their ash out the window and then butts their cigarette out the window. Aside from the fact that this causes untold numbers of what seem to be indestructible filters hanging around in the gutters and on the verges, it pisses me off even more when I'm on my Honda Goldwing right behind them, and get a face full of ash or a butt in the head. This ranks only slightly behind the idiot who dropped a bottle out his car door (yes, he opened the door), right in front of my wife and I on our bike and side-car combo in New Zealand a number of years (ok, decades) ago. It shattered and only the fact that we had windscreens on both the bike and sidecar kept us from getting cut. The Ural 650 just didn't have the guts to catch them so I could get a license number unfortunately.

I have some other pet peeves that I'll share with you in the future. Candy wrappers, plastic (processed) cheese, you know - little things like that.

If you have any of your own pet peeves I'd love to hear of them.