There are many items of everyday life need improving and in many cases, an improvement is long overdue. Here are a few ideas:
Windscreen wipers – I have mentioned these before; they don’t seem to have changed in decades. Why must we still put up with smearing, streaking and scrubbing? I have never inspected the wipers on aircraft cockpits but I jolly well hope that they are better.
Spouts – there are so many which are just plain bad and drip all over unless you get it just right. Milk jugs are by far the worse.
Labels – here I am talking about the ones you wish to remove before using the object in question e.g. cooking utensils, books, glasses etc. Some are peelable without coming to shreds. Why can’t they all be like that?
Towels – personal and dish towels. Why is it that the damn things are so poor at taking up moisture until you have used and washed them for ages?
Interior vehicle glass – the misting problem here just gets worse. OK, I read that the increasing use of plastics caused volatile compounds to be deposited on the screen and attract moisture but you’d think you could treat the glass to stop this.
Fruit and veg – surely with all the miracles of genetic engineering, we could develop some cubic varieties by now. So much easier to chop or slice and the producers could fit more to the box. And rectangular fish wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Shoes – I usually buy leather shoes and many are still not fully waterproofed regardless of the cost. Why not?
Instruction books – any instruction book should be ‘beta’ tested by ordinary folks before being released to an unsuspecting public.
Font sizes – disable the ability of all printers to do anything smaller than 8 pt. That helps folks like me with deteriorating vision and forces others to be a little more economical in their spreadsheets.
Defaults – And while we are on this subject, let’s distribute software with all defaults disabled and give people a simple list of the things they might wish to set at start-up. I’ve said before there is no way these anoraks at Microsoft have any idea what we ordinary folks wish to do.
We could apply the same idea to car instruments. Just give us the speedo & the fuel gauge and allow us to switch off all the other crap.
Light fittings – never understood why we use the bayonet fitting in the UK. The screw fitting would be much more logical.
Screw heads – can’t we have just one type? No doubt engineers will put me right here. But then engineers always want something new. As my Purchasing Manager once told me, ‘All those standard component specification books in Engineering are there to tell them what components to avoid.’
Guinness – can’t we make it just pour more quickly without detracting from the flavour and texture?
UK emergency sirens – hysterical crap these are. They scare the shit out of people and have poor directional detection. It has already been proven that the French low-frequency ones are better in most respects.
Washing machines - surely in this day and age we could do away with all that rotating machinery and just whack the muck off with ultrasonics. And let's replace the tumble drier with microwaves. Guess you wouldn't get that fresh clean smell though.
I’ll have to give this a bit more thought
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