Monday, May 26, 2014

An Unwanted Feature Can Be a Drawback

A few months ago, we traded in our electric clothes dryer for a gas model, to save money. A "feature" of this particular dryer is that if you don't take the clothes out at the end of the cycle, every few minutes the dryer rotates the clothes a bit (ostensibly to prevent wrinkling) and then sounds the "laundry's done" buzzer again. Now, that might be a great feature for many people, but for us, when we do a load of laundry at bedtime, the rotation and buzzer every few minutes is annoying. True, the buzzer can be turned off, but the rotation cannot, and our dryer is only feet from the master bedroom. So we still hear the rotation noise.

Another example of this "unwanted feature is a drawback" is the LED flashlight that I acquired recently. Push the button once and you get the full light. Push it again and you get a dim light (to allow the batteries to last a longer time?). Push once again and the light goes off. This feature is a drawback for two reasons. For those who expect simple on-off operation, requiring two clicks from on to off won't happen. (A friend clicked the light from on to dim and put it back into the glove compartment.) Second, it's just a tiny irritation to need to click, click to off, especially with the button on the base of the flashlight.

So think before you chase after all the features you can get on some new gizmo. You might be chasing a hassle.

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