A Design Crime – How Not To Design A Connector
This is the connector to get power and my computer connected to my Samsung Galaxy S5.
How Not To Design A Connector
Note the flimsy cover that clips over the orifice.
I doubt that it’ll last the life of the phone.
There is no excuse for crap design! Except perhaps in a piece of sit-upon sanitary ware!
Isn’t it about time, that all mobile devices had the same power connections?
Poor Computer System Design
I just tried to make a payment through my on-line bank account. As the payee has moved their account since last time, I needed to change the sort code and account umber. But you have to delete the old entry and re-enter a new one, as there is no other way.
I finally did the transfer, but even then, there were quite a few textual bugs in the screens I saw.
This is very poor system design and is another entry in that fat book called How Not To Design A Banking System.
My Shower Room Was Designed By An Idiot
If I’m being charitable, to call Jerry an idiot is probably best, but sometimes I feel he was almost a sadist.
I said how if you have a shower, a lot of the water outside the shower area, gets thoroughly wet and if you use the toilet in the morning, you need to put shoes on, as if you’re in socks, they just soak up the water.
But the shower isn’t fit for purpose. I find it impossible to stand in the shower and wash underneath my arms unless I use a flannel, which I don’t have to do in all of the other showers I’ve used over the last few years. And guess what? There’s no place to put a flannel, so it inevitably falls on the floor. I don’t have trouble picking it up, but the tiles he used are very slippery when wet and one day, they’ll claim a victim. I just hope it’s not me.
The shower too, doesn’t know how to mix the water, so depending on where you stand, you either get hot or cold water, but rarely something in between.
The sooner the builders finish the bathroom downstairs the better. As then they can fix the two shower rooms.
I’m looking forward to 2015!
Do Banks Design Systems To Trap Us Into Extra Payments?
Twice now in the last three months, I’ve been late with credit card payments. Nothing serious, but I got an extra charge of £12.00. I think it happened, as did the other one, because I tend to pay my credit cards all at the same time at the end of the month, when my American Express Card comes in and I’ve just had my pension payment.
So as I was flush at that time, I paid off most of the debt on the card. But apparently, I paid too early in the last accounting period or something.
The last time, it happened on another card, they phoned me to say why hadn’t I paid. When I said what about the extra payment they gave it back.
But how many of us, get caught out by rules, that need to be read by a lawyer with a fine tooth comb?
What would help, would be the ability to define your payment date on your credit card. I seem to remember doing this many years in the past. Zopa incidentally, allows this when you borrow and even allows you to change the date, due to a change of circumstances.
In some ways I’m getting my own back. For travel, hotels and large purchases, I now use my American Express card and for small ones, I now use cash. The problem is Waitrose, where their self-service tills don’t take cash. Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury, who both have better tills, do.
The Bad Design Of The Cambridge Busway
Over the life of this blog, especially when I lived near to Cambridge, I’ve flagged up the shortcomings of the Cambridge Busway. I wrote this post on the flooding in November 2009.
It seems that flooding is still a problem judging by this article in the Cambridge News.
Surely over three years later, they should have got it right by now!
A Design Crime – A Badly-Designed Handrail
I noticed this hand rail on a new Alexander Dennis Enviro 400 double-deck bus.
A Badly-Designed Handrail
The supports for the handrail mean that you can’t slide your hand up the rail, as you climb the stairs. The supports too are square, with unnecessary sharp corners.
When you have a hand with limits to what it can do, you want the rail to be as smooth as possible. This is only one example of several that I’ve encountered on London’s transport system. Some of the worst examples are on steps into the Underground.
Peckham Rye Station – A Station Designed By Several Committees
Peckham Rye station, which is is the next on from Denmark Hill station, looks like a station, that has been designed by several different individuals or committees, who had no idea what a team or a design brief was. All of these pictures were taken there.
It must have started better as the original station was designed by Charles Henry Driver, a noted Victorian architect. But I suspect the myriad companies, who have owned it since didn’t have a clue. Or it could have been a classic British Rail fix it without beauty job.
It’s also got the awful long staircases beloved of station architects until a few years ago.
Dead Naff Designs
I am a fan of Grand Designs, although I don’t watch it very often, as it’s on Channel 4 with adverts.
But the show, as the title of this post suggests, was rather a disappointment. I saw a lot of stuff that IKEA do better, but I did find a couple of companies that might be useful to me. I also found a company to help me with a project, but they said they didn’t do that, as they concentrated on their own designs. As the designs weren’t the sort of things that I like, it was probably best anyway! But like me he was an arrogant git!
So all in all, it wasn’t worth the £18 I spent.
I Do Hate Bad Design
As they say, a widow’s work is never done, but in this house it would help if everything was properly designed. Monday is washing day and look what I have to put up with to do it.
How Not to Install a Washing Machine
There is nothing wrong with the washing machine, except that a washer/dryer would be much better, but it is installed in a cupboard in the hall, along with the boiler and the hot water cylinder.
This picture doesn’t quite do the installation justice, as the flash overcame one of the biggest problems and that is the lack of light, as there is no light in the cupboard and no light in the hall. So I now use a torch to check that I haven’t dropped an escaped sock on the floor.
It would also help if I was a few centimetres taller.
So if I ever find the so-called architect or designer, who thought this up, he’ll get more than a pece of my mind. It was obviously a man, as women tend to be shorter and wouldn’t have mounted the machine so high.
There is never any excuse for bad design. At least I had an architect at my housewarming and he was able to suggest a few things for the other faults in the house that annoy me.
The Anonymous Widower 