Excalibur Online

Over Engineering

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Electronic hands-free water faucets. Does this strike anyone as being a little over-engineered for the purpose? First of all, they aren't really "hands-free", as the signs above them lead you to believe. I mean, if you want to wash your hands, I don't think it's going to work out too well, unless you actually involve them in the process. Standing there with your hands behind your back just isn't going to get them washed, no matter what the sign says.

Then, there is the matter of having to place your hands under the tap for a second before anything happens. During the time that it takes to do so, I'm pretty sure I could have turned on the tap myself, so I don't really see how time is saved using this modern method either.

Also, we lose the freedom to regulate the flow and temperature of the water coming from the tap. We are resigned to accepting the trickle of lukewarm water someone has pre-selected for our benefit. Is this progress? Heaven help you if you want to fill a water bottle from such a tap, because you're going to have to learn to like drinking lukewarm water. Let's hope the power never cuts out - not only would you have darkness, you'd have no water. And let's not even talk about how fun it is to use these sinks when the sensor gets covered with dirt or soap. Give me an old-fashioned, foot-pedal-controlled faucet any day. Or would that just be too easy?

Speaking of feet - running shoes seem to be a bit over-engineered as well. Imagine if pants were designed with the over-the-top features of Nikes. We'd have specially designed rear-grips for sitting at sporting events, more cushioned padding for watching movies and lots of pieces of material sewn every which way for torsion control and crotch support. Prominent logos would be mandatory, and you would do your fly up with laces or Velcro. And, of course, they'd be designed to show scuff marks after being worn once or twice. Nike, stay away from my pants!

Or imagine if your Ipod was as over-engineered as a Microsoft product. After waiting for it to boot up for a minute or two, you'd first have to attend to any pop-up messages about patches that you should download due to security issues. After rebooting again, you'd be presented with a menu. This menu would only have one item, named "start", from which you would need to search through to find the "play" button. Upon pressing play, you'd have to wait while the IPod scans your tracks for possible viruses. If it passes, it would alert you that you should still be careful: Your music file may still contain a malicious code, since it came from an unknown source without a signed certificate - like from a CD you ripped, for example.

After this, it would be about time to recharge the battery. Make sure you "shut down" first though, if you don't want any trouble. The shut down procedure may hang from time to time, in which case you hold down three buttons to manually reboot and perform a scan disk.

But when all this is done, it will be very easy to proceed, since a friendly paperclip will pop up telling you it noticed you'd like to play a song, and will offer to automate the process for you. After you close Clippy's window and he disappears with a "poof", which is always amusing, you are home free and ready to play some tunes.

But oh, you have already arrived at your subway stop. That's okay, you still have the return trip to figure out why the click-wheel driver has stopped working. I'm sure it will all be fixed when Ipod Vista comes out next year.

In the meantime, just be glad Microsoft didn't write the software for the hands-free water-faucets, or worse yet, the automatic toilets.


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