Every time I pick up a Mr Coffee coffee pot and it dribbles all over the table, or every time I go to put a special sheet of paper in the printer to find the paper already in there is no longer properly in place and has to be adjusted before I can stick this one special sheet on top of the stack… or every time I go to leave a voice mail and have to suffer through that interminable(1) message telling me how to leave a message, or every time I buy something that ends up in the garbage within a few minutes after it broke or was found to be of totally bad quality, or… well, you get the point. All these little annoying time wasters are nothing more nor less than bad bits of engineering(2).
Here’s the solution to all this bad engineering: Every engineer (machines, software, bridges, appliances, kitchens, cars, etc) should be required to use his own creations for the rest of his life.
That Mr Coffee coffee pot has been dribbling coffee on table tops for decades and hasn’t been fixed. (I use Black and Decker because their coffee pot never dribbles.)
Or those cup hooks that will not bite into the wood without predrilling a hole first, because the screw end has no point on it. My entire life these cups hooks have persisted as the majority solution to hanging small things from cupboards and the like, and they have always been a serious pain to use!
How do these things ever get to market in the first place? Why do they remain on the market?
But if the guy (a woman would never have crafted a coffee pot that leaks that way, let’s face it — and that’s not a piece of gender slander, it’s a fact [women make better engineers, overall]) who designed that Mr Coffee coffee pot had to use it every morning for the rest of his life, I bet it would have fixed long before now, possibly even before it ever got to market. I betcha, betcha, betcha!
The Punch line: You can’t just design stuff, pick up your pay check and walk away. You have put something into the world and you need to take total responsibility for it. (Read Frankenstein if you still have any doubts — read it, don’t just watch another movie version of it that leaves out the actual point of the book.(3) And that means the book, not the Cliff Notes!)
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(1) “the number you have dialed 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… 7… is not available. Please leave a message, or press NN for more options. When finished you may…” Gah! How many millions of man-hours are wasted world wide by people having to wait on that ridiculously laborious and drawn out message that surely we all know by heart by now? How about if I just start talking and it switches automatically to record mode, without missing anything I said? That would be friendlier, efficient and would save millions of man-hours world wide every year.
(2) Ok, they’re also signs of that awful, corrupt Corporate Mentality: “maximize profit, what ever the cost, even our reputation and our customers’ trust, or the future of the environment.” Ridiculous. Psychotic. Criminal. What’s the penalty for treason to your entire species and your home world?
(3) The Jurassic Park movies did the same thing: left out the principal point, Michael Crichton’s whole message in writing the book was “don’t do this! It’ll be impossible to contain or control.” Read the book… Hollywood flubbed the message in favor of a little action / adventure and a multi-million dollar franchise. Peanuts, compared to the seriousness of the actual message.