Category: Bad Product

Labeling of Genetically Modified Organisms

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, Education, Political, SustainabilityLeave a comment

In the 1950ies and beyond, we used asbestos as a common building material. Not until years later did we realize we were also killing ourselves with it.

Today, (G)enetically (M)odified (O)rganisms (GMOs) are food products that are modified for a variety of purposes. Monsanto is the conglomerate that brought the world Roundup, DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange, marketed aspartame, and created bovine growth hormone  (rBGH). GMOs have invaded soy, corn, sugar beets, cotton, and alfalfa.

Rats fed a lifetime diet of Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn or exposed to the company’s popular Roundup herbicide, in amounts considered “safe” in drinking water and crops in the U.S., developed tumors and suffered severe kidney and liver damage, according a study released this week.

We are eating products that include GMOs and we don’t know it. Just like we didn’t know we were breathing asbestos dust in our walls and ducts when it was making us sick.

Now California Proposition 37 should create labeling of such products. Why do you think Monsanto, Dow and DuPont and major food processors like Pepsi and CocaCola have already put up $25 million to defeat GMO labeling in California?

Because they know that if we know what we’re ingesting, we have a choice to boycott their dangerous products.

They want to keep us stupid.

Wrapped into the cloak of “bigger government is evil” they are telling us that it will make food more expensive and complex.

And exactly how is that MY problem?

They are employing a common scare tactic. Socialism. Big government. Regulation. All bad words.

Why in the world would a rational human being not want to disclose a simple truth:

I want to know what is in my food before I buy it. VERY SIMPLE DEMAND. And since I can’t enforce it myself, I want my government to do it for us. That’s what I have it for.

Grocery Loyalty Cards

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, First World Problems3 Comments

I just went to Vons (one of our local supermarkets) and bought a few incidentals. The bill came to a little over $24. The checker asked me for my Vons card. Since I don’t like to carry all these bulky cards around with me when I only use them very occasionally, I keep them in the ashtray – yes, the ashtray – of my car. What else is an ashtray good for? But I always forget to bring the card into the store.

I told her I had forgotten it in my car. She asked me to type in my phone number instead. I told her that I didn’t remember what phone number I had long ago when I got that card. So she wrote on my receipt the amount of the refund, four dollars, signed it, and asked me to bring it back the next time I came to shop.

Two things occurred to me:

1. If I can’t remember to bring the darn card into the store, how am I going to remember that I have a receipt with a $4 bonus on it?

2. I paid $4 too much for my stuff.

I resolved I should go to stores that don’t play this silly game, and let me have a fair price in the first place. All that happened in that store is that I got shafted for an extra $4 because I can’t stand carrying around with me a fat wad of loyalty cards for every business I sometimes patronize.

The Sorry State of Book Publishing

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product1 Comment

I read this book review in The Economist of August 11, 2012, page 75.

It’s a non-fiction book, titled The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future, by Victor Cha. I was excited about the book and I got ready to download it, even though $29.99 seems steep. Then I read the underlined section:

Despite a profusion of grammatical errors and the occasional malapropism…..

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

I am not paying $29.99 for a book that hasn’t benefited from minimal services of a qualified editor. There is no excuse for a single malapropism or for a profusion of grammatical errors in any book that customers pay money for.

I will let some typos and grammar error pass online, in blogs like this one, where the only editor is the writer, and the content is free for the world to read – or ignore. But if I buy a product that is shoddy, I want the right to return it. This is more difficult with a book.

I have returned badly edited Kindle books and got all my money back. Amazon is setting a good example. But I have never taken a bad hardcopy book back to the store.

I should try that sometimes. Go to the cashier and show them the typo on page 321, and ask for my money back.

I need to bring 60 Minutes  with camera crew and with me to record the look on the face of the clerk and then the manager.

The Freakiest Place Where I’ll Never Eat

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, Crack-UpsLeave a comment

Dans le Noir – in New York

Dans le noir is French for “in the dark.”

Here is their website.

Here is a review YOU MUST read.

How real is this, or is this just an Internet viral ruse?

I am not going to find out. You enjoy. I am NOT coming.

Airport Deli

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad ProductLeave a comment

I was at JFK Airport yesterday. It was late in the afternoon and I had not eaten all day. I knew I was boarding a six-hour flight, and I needed some food before I did. So I stopped at one of the delis in the concourse.

I was surprised that my sandwich and water added up to $15, but I had no time to question it or argue. I was hungry.

Not until I got home and emptied my pockets did I find this receipt – and was astonished:

I ordered a turkey sandwich. She asked what I wanted on it. Mustard, lettuce, tomato? Yes. And some onion. She asked if I wanted cheese. Oh sure. Any peppers? Yeah, throw some on.

I expected to get a nice gourmet sandwich. I got something wrapped in cellophane that all fell apart as soon as I unwrapped it. I don’t remember tasting or seeing “sweet peppers.”

I paid 99 cents for the sweet peppers, 99 cents for swiss cheese, 40 cents for extra tomatoes, and – get this – 9 cents for onions. I could have done without all of these and never even noticed.

Yippie!

Done with Netflix

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad ProductLeave a comment

In October 2011 I signed up with Netflix streaming for $7.99 a month. I wanted to see all the Breaking Bad episodes, and they had them. A few weeks later I was done watching Breaking Bad through Season 3, and Season 4 was not yet available. I ended up buying Season 4 on Bluray from Amazon.

Occasionally, when we wanted to watch a movie, we’d check Netflix and there was nothing but old crap. I can’t remember how few movies we actually watched on Netfix in the last 9 months, but it charged my credit card $7.99 every month. Yesterday, I canceled. I should have done it right after Breaking Bad in November.

Today I found this parody about Netflix – hilarious.

Automotive Control Confusion

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product3 Comments

Recently I rented a 2012 Ford Escape and I was completely bewildered by all the controls and displays. This problem is not a Ford problem. Most new cars nowadays are all computer controlled and the human interfaces to the various systems are utterly confusing, to the point of being dangerous.

You should not have to get the manual out to operate a car, but for these new cars, it’s almost a requirement.

However, when you drive away with a rental car, at least you should know how the main drive controls work, like the brakes and the lights. It would be good to know how to operate the climate controls. You should also know how to turn off the radio.

I took a few pictures to make my point.

First, car designers love to load the steering wheel with more and more controls. There are six different areas on this car alone. I labeled them Control 1 through Control 6.

Looking at Control 1, I could not, in the four days I drove this car, figure out exactly how it worked. It somehow was the thing that manipulated the screen labeled Display 1 (green arrow), cycling through the odometer displays, allowing them to be reset, showing averages, gas mileage, etc. But the various buttons sometimes responded, sometimes did not, and I could never really make sense of it. I ran with trip odometer 1 on the display simply out of frustration.

The area labeled Control 2 has to do with the sound and entertainment. Here I could also not quite figure out how it all tied in, because there were other controls and displays that also messed with the entertainment section, which I’ll get to below.

Controls 3 and 5, together, deal with cruise control. Ok, I managed to get that to work, although Ford likes to do this differently that GM and Japanese manufacturers. The Control 5 is “below” the steering wheel. It’s this large lever you pull up. In this case it means Cancel and Resume, very intuitively labeled Can/Res.

Control 4 has to do with the phone. I actually managed to hook up my iPhone over Bluetooth, which is done on a Control 7 (see below), and the phone hangup and pickup buttons worked. However, to dial, I tried to use the voice control – OH MY GOD, WHAT A MESS – so I really needed to pick up the phone itself and dial anyway.

Control 6 is the car’s wake up button (from underneath the steering wheel) to talk to it. But it understood none of my commands, and I found myself confused trying to teach it English while I was driving. It was simpler to just pull over to initiate a phone call.

A lot of the controls are now in the center console. Unfortunately, they split the controls to a top section, with the big screen (Display 2), and a bottom section with a little screen (Display 3). The bottom section looks like the radio, and I actually intuitively tried it to turn off the blasting radio when I got into the car until I realized it’s the climate control area.

However, there is a serious problem with that. Much of the climate DISPLAY is on the top screen (Display 2). So the feedback to using controls in the bottom section Control 9 is happening in Display 2 as much as I could surmise. Just turning the fans to dash control, then turning the fans to the right speed and setting a temperature required hitting several controls on the bottom and on the top sections. Eventually I got it fairly ok, and I was careful never to touch it again. I really didn’t understand how it all worked. Furthermore, the Control 9 area is obstructed by the shift lever which is not visible in my picture, since I put the car in drive to get the shift lever out of the way for this picture. Needless to say, it’s hard to operate the Control 9 area when the car is in park, because the shift lever is in the way, blocking access for the right hand.

I am assuming that the console engineers never actually sit in a car when they design this, so they don’t realize the thing is blocked in park.

Control 7 and 8 are jointly there for the entertainment section. This is the worst it, since Display 2 is also a touch screen. So some things are operated by touch buttons in Control 7, others by real buttons in Control 8. Moving around between different entertainment sources and skipping over songs on a CD was really confusing, because somehow it required the use of both Control 7 and Control 8. Control 2 on the steering wheel also messes with entertainment functions. Go figure.

I rigged up the iPhone for directions, and they played on the speaker system, but I could not make it work without the iPhone also playing its music. If I wanted to hear the directions, I needed to play music. Muting the music muted the directions. You might say that was an iPhone problem, not a Ford problem, but no. When I unplugged the iPhone and disconnected Bluetooth, the iPhone had no trouble giving me directions and didn’t need to play songs.

And here comes my favorite icon, which is Control 6 above, highlighted here:

A lot of cars now use this icon for “talk to me” in cars.

This has got to be the worst icon in human history. What’s wrong with the word Talk? In cruise control we use Can/Res. Anyone that can figure out Can/Res should be able to figure out Talk, you’d think. Same with “i”. That stands for “information.” Ok. English. The car is an English car. Talk. Please.

This is supposed to be a face. Can anyone think of an uglier face? Is this an American face, or an Asian one? I wonder what Steve Jobs would have thought of this icon?

How does grandma manage these cars? Does she ever turn on the air-conditioning? Or does she have to call her nephew to do it when summer comes?

Atrocious Kindle Editing

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad ProductLeave a comment

I just finished reading Larry Niven’s A World out of Time on the Kindle. I paid $6.50 for the book. The editing was atrocious.

There were dozens of gross errors in transcription, or whatever the process is that Amazon uses to make regular books into Kindle books. You’d think they could use the same source that the printed books use. I cannot verify that the printed books don’t have the same errors,  but I strongly believe they don’t.  You can tell by the errors.

When have you ever seen the word

memory

spelled as

rnemory

in the middle of text?

This is not a typo. This is a machine misreading the m to be an rn.

This kind of error tells me that no single human being ever read the book before Amazon published and charged $6.50 for it. It is impossible for a human to read the word rnemory and not trip over it.

Why doesn’t Amazon allow us readers to mark errors like this and synch them back to the host? The first few readers would serve as editors to get rid of trash errors like that and the rest of us would have much cleaner books.

Amazon needs to get its editing cleaned up!

German Beds are Bad

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, Travels11 Comments

I always dread the beds when I travel in Germany.

For a country that can build world-class cars and all kinds of other high-tech stuff, it’s amazing that they can’t build a single decent bed.

Here is my bedroom in one of the hotels (click to enlarge):

Bedroom at Parkhotel Maximilian – Regensburg

This was a nice, upscale hotel. The bed is a hard board with a six-inch foam pad on it. It’s hard, not healthy hard, just uncomfortable hard. The pillows, all puffed up, are feather pillows. When laying them down, they collapse to nothing, a flat pad on the mattress. The “covers” are blankets wrapped in a large “pillow case” which are not big enough to cover shoulders and feet at the same time, and not wide enough to keep my sprawling legs inside. The blankets just kind of float around on top of me.

This is not unique to this hotel or any given house. They will swear they have “a great comfortable bed” and what you get is:

A futon and a small duvet cover

Go figure.

Demise of the U.S. Postal Service

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product6 Comments

The USPS has nobody to blame but itself for its impending demise.

Just a few days ago I had another (click here for the last one) extremely frustrating experience with the services of the USPS. I was going to let it go unsung, but then I received a message from my postmaster friend about losing her position – and here I go.

She has been a postmaster in a rural post office for decades. Her customer service is impeccable. The rural postoffices in our country are institutions. The postmaster is like the pastor, the mayor and the teacher in the country of old. Yet she is being let go, after decades, without a career opportunity out. The postal service is dying, rapidly at that.

A few days ago I had to send a letter, certified with return receipt. I went to the post office in Escondido. This is a large post office, with counters everywhere. There is a machine to buy stamps, a kiosk to mail. There are racks of forms to fill out everywhere. You have to fill out two cumbersome forms by hand to mail a certified letter with return receipt. There was counter space all around the place.

But there was not a pen to be found.

Every place where the pens were supposed to be attached to the little chains, and I counted a dozen of those, the chains and pens were missing. There was no container anywhere with pens. There were no pens lying around.

I had to wait in line, ten people ahead of me, until a got to the counter, with blank forms. The clerk looked at me like I was an imbecile. Didn’t I know I needed to bring a pen to the post office? He pulled the precious pen out of his drawer of valuables. It had a big green slip of paper pasted to it so it was hard to write with. I am sure this was meant to keep it from getting stolen. I then had to stand aside while he helped a couple of other customers to fill out my forms, which I could have done many times over while in line right next to a counter.

I get pens by the dozens when I go to conferences and I throw them away. I can go to Costco and buy a lifetime supply of cheap pens for a few dollars. But a large postoffice, with significant counter traffic, has only one pen to share, like a bathroom key at a gas station.

Who has the pen right now???

The post office should have an entire barrel filled with pens, with the phone number and the web site of the USPS printed on it. They should make you take the pens home. You should want to go to the post office rather than Staples or Costco when you run out of pens and get a few more free ones. What an opportunity missed. Customer service, coupled with a necessary task of filling out the (stupid) forms, and advertising all in one! The postoffice is where you get your stamps. The postoffice is where you ship all your stuff. The postoffice is where you get your pens.

But the postoffice is missing all of those opportunities.

In an age where we no longer go down to Main Street to buy many an item, shipping locally and across the nation and the world is booming. FedEx, DHL, UPS are all burgeoning companies fed by this boom. This will not slow down. We have no viable alternative to shipping goods in sight. Shipping will grow. The USPS could have been the giant of this industry. It had all the infrastructure in place. It had the staff, the expertise, the local outlets down to every rural postoffice in the country. And yet, it can’t seem to compete and it is declining, crashing rather.

I can’t help but speculate that it must be because it’s a governmental body without the profit incentive and therefore the ingenuity, motivation and creativity it takes to survive in a dog eat dog economy, society and age.

(Is this what we’re building with government administered healthcare?)

Bad Trunk in Toyota Venza

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, First World ProblemsLeave a comment

I rented a Toyota Venza, a small SUV. Here is a picture of the trunk:

The material of the bottom of the trunk is some kind of plastic, slippery as Teflon. I put my suitcase in there and it slipped around constantly, making a terrible ruckus. I was not even able to change lanes on the freeway without the suitcase slamming right and left. The slightest acceleration made it crash against the door. Gently stopping at a traffic light, it slammed into the back of the seats. This got so annoying that I had to pull over and take the suitcase and put it in the backseat.

What were the Toyota engineers thinking when they designed the trunk material like this?

Souplantation Premium Toppings – Dumb Idea

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product1 Comment

I have patronized Souplantation restaurants as long as I can remember, late 1980ies or so. Needless to say, I like their concept, their food and I go back at least two or three times a month, usually for lunch. After I go to Europe or on an extended trip back east, I make an extra point of stopping at Souplantation.

Souplantation features a huge fresh salad and vegetable bar, as well as an assortment of eight different soups and lots of bread and fruit items. The price is below $10 per person, and it’s all you can eat. You get great value and good food for the money. I try not to go during rush hour time for lunch or dinner, as they tend to be packed and chaotic sometimes. Mid-afternoon, for a late lunch or early dinner is excellent and you get great value.

Recently they started featuring an area in the salad bar called “Premium Toppers.” There is a four-foot section of the salad bar that has what they figure special items, like artichoke hearts, mandarin slices and the like. If you choose one or more of them, you pay a Premium Toppers surcharge of $2.49. They make a point that you can’t go back for seconds either, as if  the stuff was gold or something.

Premium Salad Toppers offer high quality salad enhancements including a protein for a low price. Our intention is to offer the freedom of choice to each of our guests to choose Premium Salad Toppers to add to their dining experience. Premium salad toppers include the following options:

  • Grilled Chicken – seasoned with a salt and pepper rub
  • Herbed Chicken – white meat. The seasoning consists of rice wine vinegar, lime juice, Dijon mustard, shallots, basil, oregano & mint.
  • Hearts of Palms
  • Sliced Almonds
  • Artichoke Hearts
  • Shelled Edamame
  • Protein Packed Tofu
  • Mandarin Oranges

Prices vary upon location and can range from $1.99 – $2.49

I can’t figure out why I would want to do that. I don’t want any of  this stuff in quantity. And I can definitely live without a few cubes of tofu on my salad and save a whopping $2.49 surcharge for the pleasure.

I wonder if they measure their revenue off the Premium Toppers. I have never seen anyone take any. Is the company really that hard up for more revenue? Incremental sales?

I would not mind paying another 50 cents with every meal and keep the concept simple. Souplantation is good value already. But messing with a good thing by trying to nickel and dime repeat customers of 25 years has me flummoxed.

I hope they figure out their folly and get real – scrap the Premium Toppers.

Car Keys Hang Over Your Knee?

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad ProductLeave a comment

Being a road warrior, I rent a lot of cars. I drive all kinds of different cars, maybe 50 or 60 different ones in a year. I can’t tell you how many cars are designed so the car key chains dangle over my knees.

Rental cars have remote FOBs, sometimes even a second key, and always the rental car tag, attached to the keys. I can’t remove them, like I could with my own car.

I find it utterly distracting and hugely annoying to have my knee constantly tickled by a bunch of junk hanging from the car key in the ignition.

Do the engineers that design car dashboards actually ever drive their cars?

With rental cars I am stuck.

But I will absolutely refuse to buy a car where this happens, and this pesky little problem therefore rules out a lot of cars by American car companies.

Go figure.

Impulse Shopping at Sears

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product1 Comment

Recently I needed vacuum cleaner bags for an older Kenmore model, and I knew a surefire place to find them would be at Sears at the local mall.

As I walked back out, bags in hand, I had to pass through the men’s clothing area. A sale table of flannel shirts caught my eye. I like the soft and fuzzy feeling of flannel shirts especially when they are band-new and never washed. So I did what I seldom do: I picked up two shirts on impulse. At $20 a piece they seemed like a great deal.

Then I had to pay. I could only find a single checkout stand on the entire floor. When I got there, there was one clerk helping a woman and her child at the front, and there was a line of about four more parties waiting when I arrived. I queued up, and soon there were a few more people in line behind me. We all watched the endless shuffling and maneuvering that was going on at a snail’s pace at the register in front of us.

I waited for a number of minutes while the line was not moving. Finally I looked at my shirts and realized that I really didn’t need them, definitely not badly enough to stand in line any longer. I put them on a counter next to me and walked away.

Sears succeeded in making me – a non-shopper – decide on an impulse purchase of $40. Then they lost me because they don’t staff their stores with people who can take my money.

Sears has a problem. And it’s not competition. It’s lack of vision and customer care.