I just had to reset the clock on my stove — it beeps everytime you press a button.

Who thought this was a good UI choice? When you press + or -, the only feedback you need is that the number changes by one. I don’t need a beep everytime anything happens.

Worse yet the beep is the same beep as the alarm. That means they thing that changing the time by one minute is roughly as alarming to the user as a 2 hour roast being done.

I agree with Gojko Adzic 100% on Don’t deal with problems like Gaggia, which is to say, if you let the user break the product — and hide it in the manual — you lose at design.

In this case, it’s even worse because destroy the coffee machine is never a valid option to have on a coffee machine, but delete the database is something you have to allow somebody to do (and admins are also users). This makes my job even harder because one of the operations my team needs to provide users is delete & prove it’s gone which precludes any undeleting.

I just bought a new (ok, refurbished) Gateway laptop from Tiger Direct, I had forgotten how infuriating getting a new laptop is:

• Different manufacturers use different (and random) key layouts, I don’t use the Fn key (and I can’t re-map it!) why did it displace my precious Ctrl key?
• Widescreen laptops dont have wide keyboards, why is that? Did they feel I just had too much space and the reason I don’t use my desktop is that the key board is just too intimidating?
• I don’t want to sign up for AOL, that’s not going to happen.
• There’s a lot of annoying time limited software installed that doesn’t work — my machine actually locked up before I could install anything.

Most of the problem is that somebody paid to install software on my machine that I wouldn’t have anyway (I don’t even normally use Adobe’s PDF reader, Foxit’s reader is so much faster and nicer).