by Adam Carolla
We’ve fixed a lot of the problems with certain pieces of technology, but there are a lot of products that have stood still or even gone backward.
TOASTERS
Where’s the toaster technology? Toasters haven’t progressed since Lucy and Ricky were on TV, but now we’ve got an ankle monitor to make sure Lindsay Lohan hasn’t taken a drink. Imagine traveling back in time to the forties and telling someone sitting around their kitchen, “In 2010 this toaster isn’t gonna toast bread one second faster than it does now. Not one goddamn second. But there will be a thing the size of a pack of cigarettes you strap to your ankle that will contact a satellite if you’ve had a thimbleful of Kahlua.” They’d slam your head into their Formica tabletop and bury you in the backyard.
And half the time the toast comes out burned. Why was it built with the ability to burn the toast anyway? Do we need the ruin-my-breakfast setting? There are degrees that people enjoy, from lightly toasted to dark brown. But nobody wants briquette. Jacuzzis go from warm to hot, but not enough to kill a human or poach a salmon. The heater in your car can get pretty warm, but it will never go up to blast furnace and melt your face. Why do I need to be able to smelt ore in my toaster? I bet the toaster manufacturers have some kind of unholy alliance with the bread companies. I picture a guy who looks like Karl Rove, wearing a gold Toaster Manufacturers of America blazer and smoking a cigar, saying, “What if I could guarantee that every seventh piece of bread ends up in the garbage? It would increase your sales by fifteen percent.” Then we see the Pillsbury Doughboy laugh, slide a briefcase full of cash across the desk, and say, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
MICROWAVES
Microwaves haven’t been around as long as toasters but are also desperately in need of an overhaul. If I want to make some tea, it takes as long to heat that cup of water as it would in a kettle. Then there are mugs that I can’t touch after they come out of the microwave because they are hotter than lava while the water in the cup remains room temperature. And the man who invents a microwave that can handle foil is going to be a billionaire. Why hasn’t this happened yet? We could keep dumping money into Africa, or we could put some R&D into a microwave that can deal with the little metal handle on Chinese takeout containers.
Takeout/doggy-bagged food comes in one of three containers: either the foil pan with the bendable lip and the clear plastic top that never fits back on once it comes off, the aforementioned cardboard container with the coat hanger, and the good old foil swan. None of which will work in a microwave. Either somebody has to create a microwave that tolerates metal or the fuckwads who are in charge of designing the takeout containers should do something that is non-metallic. This doesn’t feel like too tall an order to me. It’s not 1943, and we’re not in the army. Open your fridge. Is there any metal in the containers? The milk carton, the egg carton, the tub of margarine, the Sunny D bottle, the yogurt cup … stop me when one of these fucking things has a paper clip’s worth of metal in it. But every fucking container choice on the market for the microwave contains some sort of metal.
Pardon me. I did forget a fourth option that doesn’t contain metal. It’s that white Styrofoam one that melts and becomes one with the half-eaten burger and fries you’re attempting to reanimate. And for those of you who are asking, “What’s the big deal? How about you just scrape the contents onto a plate and zap it that way?” you’re missing the point. The best part of the fettuccine Alfredo or whatever you’re reheating is trapped between the creases of that foil container and will never be set free by the futile scrapings of your cold fork. Thanks.
CELL PHONES
There are a couple of problems with cell phones. The biggest problem is that cell phones work like a dimmer when they should be more like a toggle switch. You should either get a full signal or it shouldn’t work at all. It’ll usually give you just enough signal to hear the person you’re trying to talk to ask, “Are you there? Can you hear me?” There’s enough signal to have it ring, but not enough for you to have the conversation.
Also, when my cell phone is running low on batteries, it will beep to let me know. And then eleven seconds later, it does it again. And then again and again and again. I got the message the twenty-ninth time the beep interrupted my call. You’re burning what’s left of my precious battery with your incessant chiming. And then I have to press the thing to acknowledge I know the battery is running low. You have a battery and it’s low. I get it. Why do I have to press your belly button like the Poppin’ Fresh guy? Remember four seconds ago when you told me? I heard you that time. Leave me alone. I’m on the phone. I think I could talk for an extra hour and a half if it didn’t keep beeping.
The problem is I’m walking down a sidewalk in L.A. or driving my beater truck to Home Depot and my charger is in the other car. The fucks who designed this phone act like I’m standing at a RadioShack leaning against a wall of chargers, heard the first beep, ignored it, and decided to head out to the desert, drop peyote with Jim Morrison, and chase an imaginary Indian.
And it’s unclear how long you have. You should get one heads-up when you have ten minutes of talk time left, and one more that comes in at the thirty-second mark so you know to wrap it up.
Recently I was sitting in a casting session. The poor girl who wasn’t going to get the job was standing there acting her ass off, and right in the middle of it one of the producers’ cell phones went off. It rang three times before the guy could corral it and shut it off. Why does the cell-phone ring need to repeat at paint-can-shaker speed? We heard the first one, and now we’re frantically trying to pull it out of our coat pocket at the theater. Everyone in the room heard it ring and then ring again four tenths of a second later. Why can’t it ring once and then give you a five-Mississippi to shut it off? Doc Holliday isn’t quick enough to get that iPhone out of his holster before the second ring. And like the battery beep, do you think we’re going to forget? As if the phone would ring and we’d announce, “Glad it got that out of its system. That will never happen again.” After the initial ring, you should get a full ten seconds to answer it. After that it could go into its regular mode. No one in the theater wants to hear that cell phone ring a second time, least of all the guy who is desperately trying to pull it from his pocket. Why hasn’t this happened? Who is against this?
And the aforementioned producer’s phone was set on vibrate. Let me say this about the vibrate function. People treat vibrate as if it’s a switch that means the phone doesn’t exist. It says vibrate, not invisible, not never manufactured. You’ve got a block of brushed titanium rattling on a solid mahogany desk. This is actually louder than if it just rang. It sounds as if you attacked a cookie sheet with a dentist’s drill. When I go into these casting sessions, I leave my phone in the car. Why do people insist on bringing their phones places they can’t answer them? There’s nothing so important that you’ll take the call. Unless your wife is nine months pregnant and could go into labor at any moment, there’s no reason for your phone to be on. It’s not as if it will buzz and you’ll shout, “It’s Commissioner Gordon. To the Batmobile!” It’s not President Obama, it’s your mom telling you the Ghost Whisperer is going into syndication.
Plus people don’t count cell phones as real phones. Here’s what I mean. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been talking on my cell phone pumping gas or standing out on a sidewalk and someone’s come up to me and said, “Hey Man Show. Can we get a picture? Where are the Juggies? Where’s Dr. Drew?” If I was sitting down at a desk and talking on an old-style phone with a cord attached and that same guy walked into my office, he would have done the hands-up “my bad” and slowly backed out through the door. A conversation is a conversation whether you’re using Bluetooth or a can with some yarn through it. Show some fucking respect.
And let’s talk about the design. I got into an epic battle on my radio show with the sound-effects guy Bald Bryan regarding the design of the iPhone. Bryan is a very smart and very confident
guy, which is good in a lot of respects, but it also means that when he is wrong he digs in his heels and won’t give up. One day I was making the accurate point that there is a conspiracy element to the iPhone’s design. It may not be a covert, secret, backroom conspiracy, but there are definitely problems that aren’t being addressed because the company profits. I argued that the iPhone is intentionally designed to slip out of your hand so that you’ll drop it and have to replace it. Think about it. I like my iPhone, but it’s shaped like a bar of soap and has about the same grip. How much money does Apple make each year from people dropping these devices? If you could create a product that people buy once every few years or replace every few months, which direction are you going to go in? Imagine any business working this way. What if you just made self-propelled lawnmowers and the handle design was such that people would constantly lose control and ram them into trees? And then instead of paying to repair them, they just came in, apologized, and bought a new one? Wouldn’t that be a nice windfall for your lawnmower business?
And let’s not forget to factor in the accessory market. For every second iPod and iPhone bought, there is a twenty-five-dollar rubber case purchased so that you don’t drop it again. At this point many of you hard-core Apple fans (get it? hard-core?) may be taking the side of Bald Bryan. Please permit me a few sentences to shut you all the fuck up. In a former life, I handled tools for a living. Every wrench, every belt sander, every cordless drill, every tool that fit into your hand felt like it belonged there. The shape, the materials used, the textures of those materials were all designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to not be dropped. If you design circular saws that slip out of people’s hands, the consumers are going to be out of fingers and you’ll be out of business. There’s no fucking such thing as a screwdriver with a smooth, slick titanium handle, you ass-wipes. When you hold that iPhone up to your ear, does it feel as if it belongs in your hand? Because mine feels like I’m holding a trout. Apple’s claim to fame is ergonomics. Simple, intuitive design. They’re geniuses when it comes to everything inside the iPhone, but when it comes to the design of the outside, they magically turn into retards. I don’t buy it.
And you don’t think they’re aware of the thousands, perhaps millions, of these devices that are replaced each year because they slid out of people’s hands or fell out of people’s sweatpants when they were getting out of their car? What if they lost a hundred dollars every time one slid out of someone’s hand and hit the ground? You don’t think the next generation of iPhone would have a thin rubber membrane around it or be knurled like the grip of a cop’s nine-millimeter pistol? Of course it would. Could you imagine if these assholes designed steering wheels? Every third car would be in a drainage ditch.
THE SNOOZE BAR
Alarm clocks were around for 150 years before the snooze bar got worked into the equation. This is a horrible thing to design into an alarm clock. How many man-hours have been lost? How many flights have been missed because of the snooze bar? You think, “I’ve got to be at LAX at seven o’clock—I’m gonna set the alarm for five thirty.” But you never factor in the hour you lose hitting the snooze bar eighteen times. The snooze bar should have a cutoff. Three strikes and you’re up. You know what does have a cutoff but shouldn’t? The cordless-phone locator. Have you ever gone looking for the phone around your house and you can’t find it so you hit the locator button? It rings two times and then it stops. It goes Brrrrng so you take one step to the left and it goes Brrrrng again so you take one step to the right. Then silence. You’re standing right there in front of the base where you started and you don’t know if it’s upstairs or in the basement.
Who decided that gets a cutoff, but the snooze bar is endless? It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I think I’ve figured out what people love about the snooze bar—it sounds cool. It sounds like a club Johnny Depp might have part ownership of. “Hey, Jack White’s doing an acoustic set at the Snooze Bar.” If it was called the “loser knob” or the “loaf plunger,” you would be too ashamed to hit it. And should this option even be available? Cars all have chimes that go off when you don’t fasten your seat belt, but there’s no switch that makes the annoying buzzer stop, and the reason for that is because they want you to put your fucking seat belt on. The snooze bar is the way for you to drive fifty miles out of town without ever having to fasten your seat belt. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a device that lets you sleep attached to the top of a device whose sole purpose is waking you up.
SHOELACES
Every time I put on a pair of running shoes, I have to double- and triple-knot them and then stuff the excess into my sock so I don’t trip because they give you an extra fourteen feet of lace. Who does this benefit? Does the shoe company profit by just giving away millions of linear feet of lace every year that no one wants? With every high-top basketball shoe I’ve ever owned, I eventually find myself clipping and then cauterizing the laces. I hang them over a flame and seal them up. And when I think about my dress shoes, I get livid because they give you no lace in those. No lace. I needed to hire a small Asian woman to tie my suit shoes. You shouldn’t need tweezers and a magnifying glass to tie a pair of shoes. You can try to do that bow, but halfway through the wedding one of them always comes undone. It’s the wrong kind of lace. It’s stiff, plastic, and round. What’s the deal? Are they fucking with us? There’s way too much lace on the athletic shoe and not nearly enough on the dress shoe. Couldn’t we meet somewhere in the middle, shoemaking people? Cobblers of the world unite! You’re driving me insane.
ROAD FLARES
I can’t say enough about what a terrible idea this is. After the orange reflective triangle was invented, shouldn’t these have gone the way of the dodo? If you walked up to the scene of an accident smoking a cigarette, six highway-patrol guys would tackle you to the ground. When they were done zip-tying you and putting you in the back of a cruiser, they’d continue their work throwing burning flares around the flipped-over SUV. “Hey chief, we’ve got a jackknifed big rig blocking four lanes on the 101—what should we do?” “Start diverting traffic and I’ll get those rolling fire sticks.”
STICKERS
If you walk around a store, you’ll notice that everything has stickers now. Fuck that, just walk around my house.
They make everything uglier. Like the sun visor of my wife’s Jaguar. This is a fifty-five-thousand-dollar car. It’s got Connolly leather seats, an Alcantara headliner, and burled walnut in the dash, but it also has the giant ugly yellow sticker you’d find in a beat-up Hyundai permanently welded to the visor. Would this have happened in the fifties? Could you imagine the designers back then being told they needed to add a fluorescent warning sticker to their artwork? They’d strangle you with a seat belt. (Which at that time were optional but are now mandatory and have a stupid yellow sticker for idiots who don’t know how to operate them.)
It wouldn’t be so bad if you could remove these bullshit stickers. Who decided that adhesives needed to permanently bond stickers to whatever they’re attached to? If there was a nuclear holocaust, two things would survive: cockroaches and these goddamn stickers. Whether it’s my floor jacks, my hammer, or my picture frames, I end up going at it with lighter fluid and a razor blade. Usually I end up with a bunch of sticky bits of paper still connected to my stuff. If I really give it some time and elbow grease, I can get them off, but I still have a sticker ghost that collects dirt and dog hair. I love the sticker attached to the glass of a picture frame. As if you can get that off without leaving a glue mark that will eventually collect dirt and make it look like your kid has a Hitler mustache.
So now not only are they fucking up the aesthetics of what they’re hot-glued to, they’re destroying the functioning. I have a set of putty knives with yet more stickers. The label with the brand name is right on the blade, and you couldn’t get it off with a team of Clydesdales and a blowtorch. So now in an attempt to get these off, I have scratched and bent what are supposed to be flat, smooth surface
s for evenly spreading spackle or joint compound. And since I can’t get the sticker remnants off the blades, I end up mixing them into the joint compound and leaving chunks on my wall. Great job. Mission not accomplished. Or my hammer. This thing is supposed to have a grip so it won’t slip out of your hand and kill someone. “Hey, let’s put a super-smooth, nonremovable safety sticker on there.” Are you fucking kidding me? Do you have no sense of irony?
They’re also on every piece of fruit in the produce section. Have you taken a look at a tomato lately? They look like the side of a fucking NASCAR. It takes two hours to make a salad now. The first hour and forty-five minutes are spent peeling stickers. Whenever I complain about this, there’s always some asshole who says you can eat the stickers. Great. Thirty years from now I’m going to shit out a fourteen-pound ball of stickers. I’m sure when you’re done smoking a cigarette you could swallow the filter and it wouldn’t kill you, but why the fuck should we have to do it?
