Micro Annoyances

Micro Annoyances

None of these issues rise to the level of pain or damage. But they sure cause mental anguish for me. Not because they are terribly bad, but because they could have been so easily avoided with a little thought by the perpetrators.

Pocket Dials

I regularly get phone calls that are clearly pocket dials. I have traced this to iPhones that I have called. It appears that it is very easy to provoke iPhones to call back the most recently received call. Why is it so hard to prevent this?

Tap Cards

My credit card has a chip (I assume they all do at this point). It's a pain to use compared to the magnetic strip, failing often. But that's not my topic. The card also has a tap feature - tap the card on the sensor, watch the four lights on the sensor light up. That's it. When it works - great. For me it worked about half the time. Until a friend said - tap it on the chip side of the card. What? The tap symbol is on the right hand side of the card, the chip is on the left. Well, it hasn't failed since I started using the chip side. There seems to be a major ergonomic mistake here. Also, you don't need to tap anything - just hold the chip near the sensor.

The other problem with tap - where on the card reader is the sensor? Sometimes it's separate from the screen and obvious. But if not, is it under the screen? Probably, if the software isn't lying to you that it has a tap card reader. But where under the screen?

Snowflakes

Elementary schools get this right - snowflakes have six arms. All of them. But looking at depictions of snowflakes on posters and flyers (generally from clip art, I think), a lot of people missed that lesson.

I'm not sure what happens if you break off one arm of a snowflake. Does it immediately grow back? Does the snowflake disintegrate? Maybe some damaged snowflakes have less than six arms. But eight armed snowflakes are definitely fake news.

Rate of Speed

When a reporter says that a car was being driven at a "high rate of speed" that means the car was being driven at a high speed. The word rate is completely meaningless (or perhaps it changes the meaning to the car was accelerating quickly, but I doubt it). PLEASE stop offending my brain with this phrase.

Also, if a measured value, say 100, is reduced by one half, that is 50. It is not two times lower - that would be negative 100. If something is reduced to 1/5 of its original value, that is 80% lower. It is NOT five times lower.

If news reporters don't use correct terminology, how can I trust anything that is reported? Maybe I should just take the hint instead of being offended by it.