Thu 25 October 2007 - When less is more
My sister and I recently bought our dad a microwave. Dad’s not a big technology fan. He’s at home with a typewriter and a telephone and a television, but that’s about all he needs and perhaps all he can handle.
Jeff Atwood has illustrated perfectly the problems of microwave ovens: most modern models have a heap of different buttons. People who can’t handle technology find this bewildering, and almost everybody else just ignores most of the buttons and presses the Start/30 second button.
We (okay, my sister) ended up shopping around to find one with a knob, rather than the myriad of buttons. It took a bit of hunting, and the only one around was a cheapie brand (Tiffany, which to my mind means cheapie hair-dryers in Target) and not very big. Hopefully it works reliably and is big enough.