I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

keys that summons a box that says, in effect, “This Is a Pointless Box. Do You Want It?” which is followed by another that says “Are You
Sure
You Don’t Want the Pointless Box?” Never mind all that. I have known for a long time that the computer is not my friend.
    But here is what gets me. Out of all the 102 keys at my disposal, there is no key for the fraction 1/2. Typewriter keyboards always used to have a key for 1/2. Now, however, if I wish to write 1/2, I have to bring down the font menu and call up a directory called “WP Characters,” then hunt through a number of subdirectories until I remember, or more often blunder on, the particular one, “Typographic Symbols,” in which hides the furtive 1/2 sign. This is irksome and pointless, and it doesn’t seem right to me.
    But then most things in the world don’t seem right to me. On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion, and particularly when you touch the brakes, turn a corner, or go up a gentle slope, everything slides off. There is, you see, no lip around this dashboard tray. It is just a flat space with a dimpled bottom. It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it.
    So I ask you: What then is it
for
? Somebody had to design it. It didn’t just appear spontaneously. Some person—perhaps, for all I know, a whole committee of people in the Dashboard Stowage Division—had to invest time and thought in incorporating into the design of this vehicle (it’s a Dodge Excreta, if you’re wondering) a storage tray that will actually hold nothing. That is really quite an achievement.
    But it is nothing, of course, compared with the manifold design achievements of those responsible for the modern video recorder. Now I am not going to prattle on about how impossible it is to program the typical VCR because you know that already. Nor will I observe how irritating it is that you must cross the room and get down on your stomach to confirm that it is actually recording. But I will just make one small passing observation. I recently bought a VCR, and one of the selling points—one of the things the manufacturer boasted about—was that it was capable of recording programs up to twelve months in advance. Now think about this for a moment and tell me any circumstance—and I mean any circumstance at all—in which you can envision wanting to set a video machine to record a program one year from now.
    I don’t want to sound like some old guy who is always moaning. I freely acknowledge that there are many excellent, well-engineered products that didn’t exist when I was a boy— the pocket calculator and Post-it notes are two that fill me yet with gratitude and wonder—but it does seem to me that an awful lot of things out there have been designed by people who cannot possibly have stopped to think how they will be used.
    Just think for a moment of all the everyday items you have to puzzle over—fax machines, scanners, photocopiers, hotel showers, hotel alarm clocks, airline tickets, television remote control units, microwave ovens, almost any electrical product owned by someone other than you—because they are ill thought out.
    And why are they so ill thought out? Because all the best designers are making running shoes. Either that or they are just idiots. In either case, it really isn’t fair.

Something I have long wanted to do is visit the Motel Inn in San Luis Obispo, California.
    On the face of it, this might seem an odd quest since the Motel Inn is not, by all accounts, a particularly prepossessing establishment. Built in 1925 in the Spanish colonial style much beloved by restaurant owners, Zorro, and almost no one else, it sits in the shadow of a busy elevated freeway amid a