There's Nothing Like Technology to Make Easy Things Harder

Harken back several centuries to when you were able to open up a gift on Christmas morning and actually understand it. Take, for instance, one of those antiquated electrical devices called a “radio” – some of you probably remember what those were. You opened the box, took out the “radio”, found the cord, and plugged it in.

You looked at the front and found a couple of individual knobs: “on”, which was pretty self-explanatory; “tuning”, which you knew you could turn until you found a station playing good rock and roll; “volume”, which you instinctively knew to turn until it reached the level where it irritated your parents; and, if you were really high-tech, an “AM/FM” switch to double your chances of finding Led Zeppelin.

If there was an instruction manual included at all, it was probably one page, and in one language. It wasn’t necessary to have it poorly translated into Swahili and Sanskrit. The lawyers didn’t need three or four chapters to explain how not to put the radio in your mouth while it was plugged in and you were soaking in a bathtub full of water. Somehow, without their help, you just kinda knew not to do that.

And besides, with only three or four clearly labeled buttons on the front, who really needed help from a manual to get the darn thing to work?

Fast forward to today. Radios don’t exist anymore, and what you find under the tree has names like Bean-Pod, X-Canister, and other things named after fruits and aliens. The instruction manual now has warnings and instructions and languages that number well into the tens of thousands of pages. In one of those wonderful ironies of modern life, they have managed to miniaturize the electronic device to a size that’s impossible to work with, while exponentially increasing the size of the instruction manual to a point where it requires its own zip code.

But, worst of all, all of those logical, clearly labeled, individual buttons with understandable purposes have been completely relegated to the dust heap of ancient technology. They have been replaced with the worst invention that mankind has ever been saddled with. “Multifunction” buttons.

You know what they are. They’re in your cars, on your cell phones, in your digital fruit-pods, everywhere. Chances are pretty good that you got something with a brand new and even more complicated “multifunction button” just this past Christmas. As the name might suggest, the multifunction button is supposed to replace all those old-fashioned individual controls with one or two buttons that operate all of the 632,411 functions that your new-millennium music player is capable of performing. And then, those ever-helpful designers cleverly set combinations of codes into those two buttons with the sole purpose of simplifying your life by making the new device completely inoperable.

First of all, the buttons are not even logically named. No “Button A” and “Button B” for the high-tech electronic designers of today. Oh noooooo, too simple. They would prefer to go with something way more sexy and impressive, like a “Control-Set-Input-Program-Menu-Cancel-Auto-Alpha-Mode” button, paired with an “Activate-Advance-Override-Select-De-Select-Deactivate-Beta-Mode” button. Remember – the goal here is to simplify things.

So, you get a forklift and a crane and open the instruction manual. You scan past the first 1,343 pages of warnings – “Do not use device while vomiting.” “Do not use device while unconscious or deceased.” “Do not use device if it is coated with acid.” “If flames are shooting from this device, use caution while placing it against your ear.” – and there, on page 1,344, is: “Chapter 1, Basic Activation”. (You’ve no doubt noticed that you do not “turn things on” anymore, you “activate” them).

So, with a sigh of longing for the good ol’ days, you start reading.

“To activate the device in non-sequential auto-play mode, press and hold the “Control-Set-Input-Program-Menu-Cancel-Auto-Alpha-Mode” button 1/16 of the way down, while simultaneously holding the “Activate-Advance-Override-Select-De-Select-Deactivate-Beta-Mode” button at a 45-degree angle and rotating it 11.5 degrees to the southwest. This will engage the sequencing module, which will unlock the interface limiter and enable manual/semi-manual process countdown. Do not fluctuate your finger position on the “Activate-Advance-Override-Select-De-Select-Deactivate-Beta-Mode” button by more than +/- 1/5 of a degree, or the mode will re-default to previously set internal chip parameters.”

Gotta love how simple life has become.