Stupid Interface of the Day
Surprisingly enough, a stupid interface that isn’t from Microsoft! Instead, it’s my kitchen ceiling fan.
To start with, I’m not convinced that I need a ceiling fan in the kitchen in the first place. It seems like the living room would be a better place for it. But that’s not the stupid interface, that’s just my landlord being a little goofy.
So here’s the stupid interface. The ceiling fan has 3 (I think) speeds. To change between speeds, or turn the fan on or off, there’s a single chain to pull. It cycles high, medium, low, off. But of course, being a fan, it doesn’t switch instantly from one to the other, instead it gradually slows down. The speeds don’t really look very different from each other, and there’s no other signal of which speed the fan is currently on.
Which means if you want to turn the thing off, and you don’t know its current speed (say, you just came into the apartment), the process goes like this:
- Pull the chain.
- Wait for about 30 seconds to see if the fan stops spinning.
- If the fan doesn’t stop spinning, pull the chain again.
- Wait another 30 seconds, and so on.
3 Responses to “Stupid Interface of the Day”
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they all work this way. the better way is having it attached to a power switch on the wall, and having the pull-chain set to your desired speed and always stuck there unless you flip the wall switch.
the kitchen vs living room location is the much stupider problem, esp since the fan is much too large for the kitchen yet would work well in the LR. what on earth was he thinking?
Well, then, they all have a stupid interface. The power switch on the wall also controls the light, and sometimes I want light but no fan, and sometimes I want both light and fan, so they should have separate interfaces that work.
Right. I meant an additional power switch on the wall. If it’s installed properly, there are separate switches for fan and light.