Follow-up to bad designs
OK, OK. After ranting about the stupid “random” button on my Creative Player, I actually discovered the “lock player” switch, which disables all button input and perfectly solves my vacuuming problem. I admit I should perhaps have researched a little more thoroughly before ranting about stupid designers and so on.
The thing is, though - I have what I think is a legitimate excuse for this stupidity. The “lock player” lever has a little lock icon next to it. It’s not that I hadn’t seen the button. I had just assumed that it was a write-protect switch, preventing me from overwriting or erasing files on my player. You know? Like on USB sticks. In my mind, I had drawn an analogy between the USB sticks which I hook up to my PC’s USB port to put stuff onto them and the Creative MP3 player, which I hook up to my USB port in order to put stuff onto it. The USB sticks have a shiftable button thingy with a lock icon which write-protects the USB stick. Now the new player comes along and has a slidy button thingy with a lock icon next to it. Logically (cough), I assumed this shifty button thingy was for write-protecting the player, preventing me from accidentally wiping out 20 GB of MP3s I payed for.
So, I guess this just goes to show, again, that different people develop different mental models of things and when faced with a new issue tend to apply — with as little adaptation as possible — models they’ve previously developed to the new problem.
This is a bit like my mother kept making photocopies of faxes before sending them, just because previously she’d always made photocopies of letters before sending them. It took a moment before she realized that when faxing the letters, you actually get to keep them and the other person has the copy; hence, no need to photocopy before sending.
Now if only I could find valid excuses for all my other acts of stupidity (apart from the one, obvious, explanation, which cannot really be true. I mean, come on. There has to be another reason.)
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