Inanimate objects which are pricks

The undercurrent of seething anger at substandard design should be an entry into the DSM.

Are you suggesting that the British plug is bad design?

Perhaps the problem is they’re an excellent design (they’re a perfect case study for the real ‘Murphy’s Law’)* and that they are just really smug about it.

* Not ‘anything that can go wrong will go wrong’ but more ‘if theres more than one way you can use something and one of them ends in catastrophe the it wall happen so design that catastrophe out’. Fascinating story if you’ve never read it of Murphy accidentally putting a test pilot in a comma but failing to get a reading of the G-Forces involved – the pilot was therefore ‘strained in vain’ because it was possible to fit the sensors back to front. The point of the experiment was to discover what levels of G force people could survive and accidentally creating a perfectly near-fatal amount of G they had no data on what that actually was. The catastrophe wasn’t almost unintentionally killing a guy it was that they learned nothing from it. Murphy’s pronouncement was that that it design terms should simply be impossible to fit the sensor the wrong way round.

My Indesit induction hob is a prick. It lets me turn it on, but refuses to acknowledge my attempts to turn any of the rings on because I’m pressing too hard/too softly or my fingers are too wet/too dry/not my wife’s.

Then once cooking has finally been achieved, it waits for a drip of water to land somewhere near the controls and puts on a big show of “accidentally” turning all the rings up, or down, or if it’s feeling really cantankerous, to the automatic functions that no-one ever uses or understands, bleeping a lot, and finally going into locked mode and refusing to respond to unlocking.

Prick. It’s going to get a saucepan in the face one day.

I have to confess to a bit of a Basil Fawlty moment caused by an inanimate object years ago.  I was going to a posh do.  Black tie.   We were going to be staying overnight and shortly before we packed the car to leave, I decided my dress shirt needed an iron, even though it probably didn’t.  All was going well until the steam iron gave an asthmatic wheezy cough – and threw up a load of grubby water and limescale through the steam holes.  All over the front of my pristine white shirt.  I took it into the garage, put it on the concrete floor and bashed the shit out of it with a hammer for a good minute or so, whilst informing it colourfully of it’s inadequacies and my disappointment in it. Not proud.

I like this thread, it’s like a support group 😁

I too have a smug prick washing machine that plays an ‘uplifting’ tune every time its completed its one and only task. Beeping would have been fine, I don’t need to listen to a 1990’s ring tone for the next five minutes.

Door handles can **** the **** off too 😡

I’d like to add Google maps sat nav woman, Christ she’s a nag, I don’t need to hear the same direction three times in a row..
“At the next roundabout take the 3rd exit”….

“At the roundabout take the 3rd exit”…I know! You told me 5 seconds ago!

Drives onto the roundabout

“take the 3rd exit” **** off!!

I then miss the 3rd exit because I’ve lost my shit

“Continue around the roundabout and take the 3rd exit”

☹️

Oh yes Bosch ovens. What is the point in that alarm anyway?
“blip…blip…blip” for about 20 seconds, just about the right volume to be inaudible over any other loud noise, say if you’re washing up with the tap running on the other side of the room.

I have to confess to a bit of a Basil Fawlty moment caused by an inanimate object years ago.

Similar. In my case it was a lawn ‘mower’, whose sole purpose in life was to make grass shorter. Nope, too difficult. It was best at making grass more tangled, and also muddy at the same time. Utter B’stard.
Suffice to say that it lost against a sledge hammer one afternoon.

My Indesit induction hob is a prick

All induction hobs are utter pricks. On the rare occasions you can actually turn them on/off as required, there’s a micro gap in the settings between “barely warm” and “thermonuclear explosion”.
Setting 7: nothing
Setting 8: boiling water exploding out of the pan and all over the hob.

At which point the hob will decide it needs to beep every 4 seconds to tell you that it’s wet and can no longer function. It then requires the oven equivalent of a luxury valet before it will decide that it’s sufficiently dry to once again burn pans to a crisp.

Cacti.

Just pricks – thats all they are

My Indesit induction hob is a prick. It lets me turn it on, but refuses to acknowledge my attempts to turn any of the rings on because I’m pressing too hard/too softly or my fingers are too wet/too dry/not my wife’s.

Is “Indesit induction hob” a euphemism?

I’d like to add Google maps sat nav woman, Christ she’s a nag,

You know you can turn that off? There’s three settings: naggy cow, ‘boing’ and silent.

It sounds like a smoke alarm with a low battery… but they’re all hard-wired.

Do hard wired smoke alarms not still have battery backup? I’ve definitely replaced batteries in irritatingly beeping hard wired smoke alarms before.

there’s one intermittent beep that we keep hearing and we don’t know what it is.

I used to work in a tech lab. We had our own little server room segregated from the main corporate network.

We started hearing beeps at random. This in itself wasn’t uncommon, the lab was built from the rest of the building’s cast-off hardware so (say) the UPS shitting itself was pretty much expected. I’d hear the alarm, go into the back, and it’d stop. Back into the main office and it’d start again. It was toying with me.

This went on for months. It got to a point, I had ladders out and half of the suspended ceiling in bits. I’d hear a beep, sprint into the back room like a man posessed and stuff my head into the plenum to try and echolocate where the hell it was coming from.

Finally one day, I got to the bottom of it. Sound carries, it was a ****ing delivery lorry reversing outside.

Prick.

At which point the hob will decide it needs to beep every 4 seconds to tell you that it’s wet and can no longer function. It then requires the oven equivalent of a luxury valet before it will decide that it’s sufficiently dry to once again burn pans to a crisp.

I hear you. I feel like some kind of slave whose some reason for existing is to maintain the utmost cleanliness around the controls… A drip of condensation from a pan lid? I’m sorry your Highness, allow me to reflexively grab the tea towel and dry that for you instantly… Not quick enough? No, you’re right sir, I must be sentenced to 50 bleeps and then return to the beginning of my cooking.

Thing is, it actually does the cooking bit reasonably well, it’s just the controls. But the halogen hob in our last rental house cooked about as well as any other halogen hob (terribly) but the controls were tolerant of minor spills, so the technology is there. Just put them in the same bloody product!

I’m generally an even-tempered, laid-back person, but I will also admit to having launched inanimate objects at solid walls in anger. Hob should be glad it’s sealed to the worktop.

Do hard wired smoke alarms not still have battery backup? I’ve definitely replaced batteries in irritatingly beeping hard wired smoke alarms before.

Yup.

You know you can turn that off? There’s three settings: naggy cow, ‘boing’ and silent.

Ooohh! Thanks for that.

rushes off to google….

Well, that took a bit of finding. I shall try alerts only, I just want her to tell me once, that would be lovely.

Watch me miss every turning next time I use it, I’ll be able to feel her judgement every time she has to recalculate the route 🙁

Inanimate object which are pricks?

Tories? All politicians tbh.

May have been done but the little milk jugs you get in cafes, their one job is to pour milk into my drink and yet 95% of them send it all over the table as well. Pricks!

Good call on the jugs, we’ve got one, it’s useless, well, unless the idea is to tip most of the contents onto the table.

‘Easy open’ bacon packets, Ha! they even have a little pull tab to lure you in. Do they ever work? do they ****, they’re **** useless, the **** ****. ****!

Can I add Microsoft authenticator to the list …

An absolutely utter bag of sour pills

Coffee tables. Positioned perfectly for maximum shin damage, collect random crap, never actually any clear space on them for your coffee.

ive made my own- from bits of old kitchen worktop & legs from etsy and is height perfect for a beer next to the sofa  & the key bit is that ive put an integrated bottle opener underneath the corner of both, on reflection more of a beer table than a coffee table

Oral-B iO toothbrush.

It actually seems to do a good job of tooth brushing. My hygienist attested to that. However it’s a prick. It’s forever dying of surprise flat battery mid-brush, but its wilfully misleading charge state is only flashed up for half a second just as any sane person would be spitting used toothpaste. I hate it for being such a dickhead while also serving its actual purpose quite well.

‘Easy open’ bacon packets, Ha! they even have a little pull tab to lure you in.

“Peel here.” When the glue is stronger than the film. Prick.

we rebuilt the house a while back and got a pack of white goods in the bargain.  We thought it would make sense to use the new items, what a mistake…

Gas hob that now moans after cooking even if everything is switched off.  It also has a timer that goes nuts if you drop any moisture on it.

Extractor fan that makes more noise than any I have owned, even on its lowest setting you have to shout at each other

Dishwasher that nothing can stand up in the top tray so we have broken so many glasses I have lost count

Washing machine (not from this package but at the same time, and thankfully went bang a year ago) that will not spin if you put more than two towels in or less than a full load.  Play a 15 minute piece of ginggly music at the end of a messed up cycle.  If you need to stop it to add that dropped sock I think it knows you are waiting so makes you wait for 15 minutes to open the door, and if you tug on the door it makes you wait longer

We have a mechanical door bell. Think Addams Family.

Pull the big handle and a chord, that goes through the exterior wall and round a series of pulleys, moves a spiral spring with a bell on it.

1. It isn’t loud enough for anyone in the house to actually hear.

2. When the string snaps you have to dismantle it all and re-thread it whilst working against the tension of the spring. This involves tying a knot one handed whilst up a ladder with a screw driver clamped between your teeth.

I hate our doorbell.

If there is one lesson that everybody can take away from this it is never EVER by a house off middle aged Goths.

You know you can turn that off? There’s three settings: naggy cow, ‘boing’ and silent.

But I don’t want some woman booing me just because I won’t do a u-turn.

Last thing I beat to death was one of my twin boys travel cot’s.  £80 one you could put up but not down, it would take hours.  So one day I kicked the **** out of it.  The other £30 from Asda, looked the same but worked.

“peel here” ham packets in Switzerland  you wont be surprised to hear that work

That thing about the crash detection system in cars has reminded me. Our Skoda has some sort of system that integrates the parking sensors and longer-range adaptive cruise control, and can alert us if it thinks we’re going to hit something while we’re driving.

Every now and then, when driving at around 20mph, this will trigger at the front of the car – and then, a moment later at the back of the car. When there’s clearly nothing there.

The first couple of times it did it, it properly shook me. It’s now happened enough times that my son will remark “have we just driven through another ghost?”

Last thing I beat to death was one of my twin boys travel cot’s.

never been so relieved when I reached the end of a sentence 🙂

It did start poorly, then got considerably worse 😂

My Transit van has a warning beep for engine-killing problems like low oil, brake fluid etc. And when it’s cold. So you can be driving along the motorway and it will suddenly startle you to let you know it’s cold outside. My grandson loves the way it makes me swear on our way to footie matches on Saturday mornings and has taken to joining in my diatribes.

I hardly dare mention hose pipes they put me in such a mood. In fact I’m not going to describe how angry they make me because it will spoil the rest of my day.

Autocorrect which you don’t realise is on. In typing this post it has decided that when I type startle I meant to type start, and swear becomes sweat. **** right off, I know what I mean!

Every now and then, when driving at around 20mph, this will trigger at the front of the car – and then, a moment later at the back of the car. When there’s clearly nothing there.

Leaves and debris blowing up off the road will sometimes trigger them. As will clouds of spray, the sort where an oncoming lorry blasts the entire car with a wall of spray.

Everyone going on about “self-driving cars will soon be here, we’ll all just be able to call up a robot car on an app…”

No you won’t, the stupid thing will have got itself stuck in some kind of self-parking / collision alert loop or got so confused over trying to read conflicting speed limit signs that it’ll just stop.

Somewhere there’s a whole other thread about insane / dangerous / stupid driving aids in modern cars.

See through plastic blister packs containing potentially useful, yet inaccessible, scissors.

I hardly dare mention hose pipes they put me in such a mood. In fact I’m not going to describe how angry they make me because it will spoil the rest of my day.

Hozelock fittings? Hateful, brittle, leaky yellow bastards that never last a year without failing.

I hate our doorbell.

Sounds a right PITA, but it begs the question, why don’t you remove it and fit a push button one?

The internet. Everything I try to do ends in a emotionally churned sweary wormhole. I took days to recover from an incident where I needed to log in to an account and couldn’t get past the login stage. I have just tried to turn ads off on this site by taking the advice above to go to my profile and turn them off in preferences. Got my profile ok… can’t find preferences! I realise this is standard old person and the internet stuff but it’s becoming increasingly the case that I am excluded from day to day activities like parking, shopping, banking etc because I am too much of an old dog to learn new tricks

Has anyone (perhaps @cougar?) shared this thread back with the original one on Mumsnet? I’m sure they’d appreciate what they started several years ago; we’ve diversified well beyond the dishwashers, washing machines and assorted vacuum cleaners which were the bane of many lives there.

My adaptive cruise control on my car is great except when it would be most useful, like driving in rain, sleet or snow. Then it’ll just turn itself off declaring that it can’t cope with the current weather (or something along those lines), pretty alarming when your on slight bend on a motorway doing 70mph. First world problem I know but is still anoying.

Chappie dog food.

MrsSC has just bought a tin to stop the dog starving to death before she does the delayed weekly shop.

Set firmly into the tin except it then randomly explodes everywhere as you try and fork it out. FFS,

One of the door handles in my house is a little bit like this:

https://www.diy.com/departments/georgian-satin-bathroom-door-handles-latch-door-handles/8561558683991_BQ.prd

It has spikes on the end of the handle to make it super uncomfy to hold, and give it additional clothes snagging abilities.

I keep meaning to buy new handles, but it’s one of those things that I always forget about, that is until next time I have to touch it, and swear at it.