Geekfoolery

This is, we have been told, the push-button world of the future. The world is our oyster, and we command great power at the end of our fingertips–simply push, and anything from a cup of coffee to nuclear war can be ours.

But there are some buttons in this world that just don’t work. Don’t argue with me, you know it’s true–it’s all some kind of scam, or a Brazil-esque dystopia designed by Terry Gilliam. We sit and push the button hoping for the cheese while the cosmic lab assistants measure our behavior and heart rate and brainwaves. Why don’t these buttons work?

1. The elevator close door button. I have no idea why this is even on the panel. It does nothing, of course, and there is nothing worse than being caught frantically pushing it to keep Flanders from accounting from making the it on the elevator before the doors close and next thing you know you’re having a fake chummy discussion with a co-worker you’d prefer had fallen down an open elevator shaft. I think it’s disconnected entirely, and the elevator people keep it there just to get us used to the idea that pushing the button does no good. This prepares us mentally for the time when the elevator is stuck and we’re desperately pushing the emergency button in a futile frenzy.
2. The Push to Walk button. I’d long suspected these well-worn round metal buttons on street corners everywhere weren’t hooked up to anything. Now it’s been confirmed–New York City quietly disconnected a few thousand of them, figuring their new computer traffic light system made them unnecessary. The left the buttons there, though, and didn’t tell anyone they were now non-functional, on the theory, “Who’s gonna know? Who’s gonna complain?” Any calls that might have come in could be dismissed by New York’s department that handles street lights with a “sure, yeah, we’ll send a truck over right away,” though how that differs from areas where these buttons supposedly still work is unclear to me.
3. The “Insert” key on a standard keyboard. If you’re on a PC, look at your keyboard. Upper right, next to the Page Up and Page Down keys is one called Insert. Raise your hand if you’ve EVER used it. Raise both hands if you know what it does. Somewhere in the ancient mists of time, some computer designer thought that sometimes when you type, you want characters to overwrite what is on the screen, and other times you want to insert text into the screen. To this day, this man has never had a date or moved out of his parent’s basement. The only thing this button ever does is once in a while someone hits it by accident and then can’t figure out why everything they’re typing is overwriting what they’ve already written.
4. The “Turbo” button. I used to have an old PC–I want to say a 486–that had a “Turbo” button that was supposed to make it go faster. Why? I ask, why? I am not asking why you would want your computer to go faster. I am asking why you would ever want your computer to go slower. “I’m just doing a couple emails here, I think I’ll turn off the turbo here.” I imagine some guy sitting at this laptop, thinking of Mad Max in The Road Warrior, turning off his supercharger to save precious gasoline. I have no idea what you save by not using the Turbo button on the PC. Plus I could never even tell the difference with the button on or off. I am sure it was hooked up to the LED indicator and nothing more.
5. The light switch in the house that doesn’t do anything. You have one, somewhere. A vestigial remnant of some long-forgotten home improvement, it’s just there. Rich Hall, creator of Sniglets, called it the Flarpswitch. Steven Wright would turn it on and off every now and then until a woman in Germany called him and told him to cut it out. There has to be a better way to run wires in a house so that we can connect these forgotten, misfit switches to other things in the house. Like the Turbo button on my PC, for example.

That’s just five. I know there are more. Let me know about your buttons that don’t work.

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