An open note to Sony

[talisantia.livejournal.com]

Will you PLEASE put a great big orange sticker on the Playstation 3, or a brightly colored flyer in the packaging, or SOMETHING which is difficult to miss that indicates clearly that you must connect it with A/V cables and go into the menu to enable the HDMI connector before you hook it to your TV with HDMI?

I am getting very, very tired of getting calls from people who think their TV is broken because you bury that vital little tidbit in small print in the back of your manual. I don't work for Sony, it's not my job to tell people how to operate your retarded product, especially when a minimal effort on your part would eliminate the confusion.

Thanks.

(no subject)

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

So, i was voluntold (kind of like volunteering, only i didn't have a choice) to present a class on some radio equipment that we've had kicking around our organization since...well, it's pretty old stuff. Probably early 80's (which makes this technology nearly as old as i am), because the folks that get to spend money around here don't want to join the new millenium.
Of course, as antequated as these radios are, they're still in regular use. One of my jobs is to load encryption and other privacy software into them before they can be of real use.
This class supposed to reduce the frequency of interruptions due to the radios getting out of synch, at which point they come back to me to get reloaded.

Anyway, i started to give a simple, straight-forward class on how these folks can load the software themselves. One guy kept asking me in-depth questions on how the things work. EVERYTHING I SAID was met with an interruption of "but why?" or "but how?"

YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS, GOOFBALL! YOU JUST NEED TO KNOW WHAT TO DO!

You hook it up the computer, press this button, then press another button. Then, you can push a button and talk.

You DON'T need to know what the privacy softwares does, or how it knows the air-speed velocity of the unladen SWALLOW, for fucksakes. You want to know that, RTFM! Oh wait...if you'd done that, i wouldn't have to give step-by-step illustrations on how to operate the damned thing to begin with.

This moron turned a 20-minute walkthrough into a 3-hour waste of my off-time. Asshat.

The best part? In all likelyhood, i'll have to give another class on how to use out-dated technology again. Because pressing 3 buttons (literally) is SOOO complicated nobody will remember by now. And he'll still be there, asking asinine, off-subject questions.