The Popcorn Stand: Slamming and jamming

Elon Musk is a man after my own heart and his quote will be the featured quote in Sunday’s editorial pages.

“Any product that needs a manual to work is broken,” Musk said.

I couldn’t agree more, although I would take it a step further. In my latest rant about “stuff that works, all I want is stuff that works,” I’ve always wanted to propose to the IT-scientist-technology-inventor-types, whenever they come up with something they believe to be the greatest thing since sliced bread (which of course leads me to the George Carlin bit, what’s so great about sliced bread, it’s bread and you slice it), a 2-year-old should have to come into the room to use it and if the 2-year-old can use it without any directions or a manual, then they can ask me to use it.

Fellow staff member Rick Hoover also had the other quote of the day: “They have the technology that closes the door but doesn’t slam.” We seem to have missed out on that technology here at the Appeal. We have a door within feet of what is our newsroom area and there’s no thing-a-ma-gig to catch the door before it closes so about 20 times during the day we wonder why everybody’s so mad and then realize it’s just the door that’s without the closing technology and always slams.

This shouldn’t be a case of a 1970s TV show, but I do believe “we have the technology, we can rebuild it.” As far as I know the technology to catch a door when it closes so it doesn’t slam has existed since the 1970s.

Again, maybe I’m just an old fuddy, duddy, but it seems like everything today doesn’t work like it used to. (As I wrote that sentence, another angry person just slammed the door, oh wait a minute, my bad).

Maybe I’ll start up a petition to make Guy Clark’s “Stuff That Works” our national song. I don’t know if it will do any good, but it will make me feel better.

And it would be slammin’.

— Charles Whisnand