SRTFN

Yes, a SRTFN button needs to be on every product. Stop, Right the Fuck NOW! - Especially printers and computers. Computers also need a previous screen - so NO MATTER WHAT you can go back to the mouse click right before you fucked up. I do it every day. Pay Now, and then you see the wrong shipping address on the screen right before it goes to the Order Confirmed screen. Or the spell checker lulling you into yes, yes, yes, yes as it repeatedly asks you to check the name of your town, your street, or whatever it comes up with - and then that one typo you skip on by, because why? - because you can't go back one screen and you have to go through the whole freaking thing again. - Yes, that's how you spell Ferd Berferd twenty three times...
But the SRTFN button would be key for printers that insist on spitting out pages of six random characters, one after another until it's out of paper... What is this, some sort of deal with Hammermill? - How many forests have been taken down because of that one extra sheet printed with some insidious line on the top. "Mapquest 1977 copyright" or something equally as enlightening, let alone the remarkable, and faster than that printer has ever moved, fuck up of spitting out tons of gibberish paper that causes you to either pull the sheet out of its little death-grip rollers as they protest with breaking sounds and not-supposed-to-turn-that-way clicks, or unplug the thing frantically as it uses all the photo paper in the house. SRTFN!

I have a coffeemaker that beeps when it's done. How nice. You have to unplug it to make it stop. Keen! - My favorite thing EVER! - beeping things. I have a UPS that I use for my cable modem and my wireless router. Both wall-wart transformer appliances with a total power draw measured in milliamps, thereby usable for hours plugged into the cheapest UPS on the market. Usually the cable is still connected eventhough some sap plowed into the power transformer upon the first snow - but NO, one must listen to an incessant beeping every minute, as the UPS dutifully warns me the power is off. SRTFN! - Of course the manufacturer tells me that all I have to do is install the software on my PC and go into it and turn off the alarm. How handy. I don't use a PC. In my industry if I were to walk into a customer site with a PC I would be laughed out of the building. I work for Hewlett Packard and they buy me the latest Apple computers just for this reason. I don't own a PC - don't even have one at work! - let alone having the god forsaken thing hooked up to the UPS. I just want the evil freaking beep to stop! - One customer service rep told me I could screw a wood screw into the cabinet and pin the little speaker, rendering it useless, but I couldn't find it, so I listened to the beep for a few hours and, as you can see, it only shortened my life a few years with the angst it caused. Alarm clocks have to be one of my favorites. Haven't used one since I threw papers when I was a kid and got up before 5. Even then I noticed I woke up right before the thing went off, so I just started waking up and it has failed me maybe once a year or so since. Much less than alarm clocks. Now I am in a household of alarm clock users. How often do they go off on the weekends? - With no one around? - I would say more than it actually is, I am sure, looking for just those times in my mind, but really - just short of locks, if anything else worked against the user so much, would it exist? And as long as I am on this rant, what do locks lock anyway? - what are we locking? - I'll tell you - fear - that's right F-E-A-R - nothing more - except when they work against their owner, then they lock YOU out - but other than that, I can assure you locks are tested less than .00000000001% of the time, let alone actually lock out the bad guys. They work against their owners 99.9999999999% of the time and are you really any less afraid? Maybe in the future we can have locks that report if they are even tried so we can see how silly it is to religiously lock them for no reason. My answer? - I lock things pretty rarely. I think it's kind of funny to see people get locked out of things, but when it's me it's never pretty. Nothing gets me to my core faster than being outdone by a machine, and one that is supposed to benefit me (aren't they all?) outdoing me gets me there all the quicker.