Petty engineering design rant 6 - ambidextrous cheddar

It's been a while since the last entry, but this week I came across a new curiosity for which I thought it was worth resurrecting the series.  This one is definitely in the "utterly inconsequential" category, to the extent that it doesn't actually annoy me in the slightest; rather, it just intrigued me.  Enter stage left:  The Lake District Cheese Company.

The Lake District Cheese Company have been taking their packaging seriously, including the now-becoming-standard re-close-able* zip lock thingy. If you'd care to click the image to view it full size, I'd like to draw your attention to the helpful scissor-cutting dotted line in the top left-hand corner. If you turn the packet over there's an identical one on the other side, again in the top left as your look at it.

Now imagine cutting the packet open along the line with a pair of scissors. It won't take the right-handed amongst you very long to come to one of two conclusions:

a) the packaging designer was left-handed;
OR
b) the packaging designer was right-handed and an idiot.

That's all really. Like I said, of no consequence whatsoever. My desire for cheese probably won't let me go without a cheese-packet-opening solution for very long. But if you think it's necessary to issue instructions on how to safely and conveniently open your packet of cheese, it might be an idea to try it out with a representative of 90% of the world's population first**.

*interestingly, my spell-checker refuses to accept the existence of either "reclosable" or "recloseable" as English words. Ho hum.

**Ooh, ooh, I've thought of a third possible conclusion! Maybe they're marketing their cheese as a foodstuff for the "left-handed cheese connoisseur" market! In which case, I feel excluded and miserable.

Petty engineering design rant 5 - the spoons of doom

P.E.D.R. returns with a light-hearted entry, which some of you may be familiar with: my parents' cutlery, and in particular, the spoons. I don't have a picture of the real thing, so imagine something like these ones:















but with slightly chunkier handles. Handles, in fact, whose chunkiness outweighs the business end of the spoon. And thus the spoons, following the simple physical laws of leverage, tend to overbalance if you don't put them far enough onto your bowl.

The best and most amusing effects occur when one's dish contains an edible delight with a bit of viscosity to it, such as a thick soup, or a pudding, or porridge or similar. (Well, perhaps not porridge in my case, but the delightfulness of edible dishes is strictly subjective... Let's stick with puddings for the sake of this particular argument.)

Thus, at some inevitable yet indeterminate point through the course of the meal, the forces of gravity acting on the handle finally create a turning moment sufficient to overcome those being applied by the viscosity of the pudding, and the dessert-laden miniature impromptu Roman siege engine of doom catapults into action and claims another victim. A positive triumph of utensil engineering. Yes indeed :o)

Petty engineering design rant 4 - printer cartridges

Right printer, my letter is entirely in black, no colour whatsoever. Why oh why, then, do you refuse to do anything at all unless you have ink in both your black and colour cartridges? Likewise, why do you need me to buy a black cartridge to print a document entirely composed of blue text? Or indeed red text? Is there any actual truthful reason you need both, or is this really the cheap money-making scam it appears to be?












This is a petty annoyance with a more serious point behind it. I’ve had the joy (ahem) of working for a few places with fairly beefy printers connected to networks serving say a couple of dozen people, and so were under fairly constant use. I shall keep the manufacturer’s name under my hat for now - suffice to say they’re a big brand, reputable company which you will all have heard of - but I suspect the following practice is probably fairly widespread.

After a few weeks use, the little status display screen on the top would switch to something along the lines of “fuser unit 2317 pages remaining - order replacement part”. 2317 pages remaining until what? Is it going to self-destruct? Explode in a cloud of magenta toner dust? It’s obviously an artificial countdown, as to predict the failure of a component that precisely would require some seriously complicated monitoring equipment which would obviously be far too expensive to include in your average office printer.

What actually happens when the countdown reaches zero is... nothing. The printer just sits there blinking “replace fuser unit”, and refuses to do anything else until you comply. After the prerequisite bureaucracy and stressed budget balancing, some 3rd party printer servicing bloke appears to replace the part, has a look at the old one, and reckons it’s still got at least a couple of hundred thousand more pages worth of use left in it. You can’t reset the counter manually, and the printer recognises if you try and put the old one back in.

So does that imply that the printer company have actually gone to the trouble of putting counters in individual components, just so that they can extort another £250 (or whatever price it is) out of you for a replacement for a part that didn’t actually need replacing? Not only have they thought “we can make some money out of spare parts”, but they’ve sunk to the base level of designing in bogus lifetime counters so that the end user will think “I’ve spent 3 grand on a nice colour laser printer - I can’t afford to not buy these spare bits to get it up and running again”, and effectively holding departments hostage until the ransom gets paid. Outrageous behaviour! I can’t understand how reputable companies are allowed to get away with such a blatant scam! And what an utter pointless waste of resources. Yes, regular maintenance is good, but don’t use that as cover for your greed.

As a final peeve, I’d like to wonder out loud about all that used office equipment that gets shipped off under “re-use” schemes to developing countries after businesses upgrade their kit. Are these final end users, relying on donations of useful second-hand-but-serviceable equipment going to be able to afford a new unnecessary replacement for a part that doesn’t need replacing? Are they going to be impressed when their shiny new printer manages a measly couple of thousand pages and then sits there blinking? No. Shame on you.

Petty engineering design rant 3 - toothpaste tube lids

Okay, a short one this time: those flip-top toothpaste tube tops which tempt the brusher into supposed easy access to the minty-fresh delights within, but which actually just result in a trailing tail of said paste being smeared elegantly over the tube, your hand, and everything else in the vicinity. Who thought that was a good idea? Same goes for flip-tops on squeezy bottles of honey or ketchup - although with those you at least have a reasonable chance of being able to wipe them clean - on the toothpaste tube, the paste gets stuck forever in the handy little grooves they put on the lid to help you grip the top while unscrewing it. Like you should.












Screw top, or flip-top if you absolutely must, but not both. Thank you.

Petty engineering design rant 2 - central heating controllers

So, second post in my ‘being irritated by little things which really shouldn’t matter, but somehow just do’ series:

Now, obviously my heating system needs some method of user input, which should preferably be nice and simple to operate, logically laid out, quick to adjust and so on (and perhaps in these carbon-saving times, designed in a manner which might encourage me to use it slightly less).

I quite like the older-style mechanical ones - you know, the ones with the rotary dial bit with little teeth you flip up and down, or pins you put in holes, or something like that. One glance at it tells you exactly what it’s doing - when it’s going to come on, how long for, and when it’s going to switch off again. To alter the setting it’s dead simple as well - flip a few teeth, move a pin or two - takes about 10 seconds from start to finish.

Our boiler’s controller, however, is a clear casualty of “it ain’t broke, but we’ve got to get the word “digital” in here somewhere even if it kills us” syndrome:












I had a look just now to check what it was set to, and it took me 21 button presses! 21!!! And that’s assuming you get them in the right order to navigate yourself through its invisible menu system (it’s like one of those ancient text-based computer games: “There are exits to the South, South and South. You can see a drowning polar bear. You are holding a garlic press and half a packet of cheese-and-onion Hula Hoops. What would you like to do?” - except much less sensible and intuitive). To actually change the settings will take 30+ presses, again assuming you make no mistakes along the way.

Also, it would be amazingly useful if it had a ‘boost’ button like some do, which allow you to stick it on for another hour, safe in the knowledge that it will turn itself back off again by itself so you can just forget about it. Our one? Well, hitting ‘advance’ makes it go on until the next set ‘off’ time - which could be anytime within the next 23 hours and 59 minutes. To find out when, if you’ll remember, will require an error-free succession of not less than 21 button presses while crouched at an awkward angle at the bottom of a dark cupboard.

Useful. Not. Grrrr.

Vociferation concluded.
J

Petty engineering design rant 1 - juice carton spouts

Right, let’s design a spout for a carton of juice. So, what would be some good criteria for a well-functioning spout? Here’s a few suggestions:

1. easy to open.
2. re-sealable, keeping the liquid inside the box.
3. has an opening that allows juice to flow freely while pouring.
4. lets air back into the box so that the pouring liquid doesn’t sputter all over the place.
5. lets you get all the liquid out of the box without retaining the last 10% of the contents.
6. allows you to open without dirt getting into the box.

And somewhere down the line you might have “cheapness” and “ease of manufacture” as criteria.

So, Messrs Tetrapak/Somerfield/Tesco/Asda/Waitrose/Sainsbury/Morrisons/etc, how on earth did you come to the conclusion that this abysmal monstrosity would be a good design:












Eh? Eh?!

It’s difficult to open, doesn’t keep the liquid in, only allows a dribble to come out, splashes unpredictably as the air tries to get back in, keeps the last little bit of juice as some kind of hostage (presumably for some mysterious dark scheme of its own), and to open it you have to poke the dirty (and shaped-so-you-can’t-possibly-clean-it) bit into the box! (Take a breath.) Fail, fail, and fail again. Opening the box the old-fashioned way with a pair of scissors is better on at least 4 of those criteria...

And I bet it isn’t any cheaper or easier to manufacture than any of the other liquid-container-openings out there. Bring on the pair of scissors.

Rant over :o)
J