Thomas Sowell: Complicating the obvious

Thomas Sowell: Complicating the obvious | TBO.com and The Tampa Tribune
Engineers who design computerized products and services seem to have an almost fanatical determination to avoid using plain English.
It is understandable when complicated processes require complicated operations.
But when the very simplest things are designed with needless complications or murky instructions, that is something else.
For example, like all sorts of other devices, computers and computerized products and services have to be turned on and off.
And everybody knows what the words “on” and “off” mean.
But how often have you seen a computer or a computerized product or service that used the words “on” or “off”?
These simple and obvious words are avoided like the plague on many electronic devices — and this is symptomatic of a mindset that creates bigger problems with other operations.
It is as if using words that everybody understands is beneath the dignity of a high-tech product.
Often “power” is substituted for “on” and all sorts of words or symbols are substituted for “off.”
A laptop computer of mine had an unidentified symbol on the screen, and only after you clicked on that symbol did another symbol appear, with some words indicating where you could turn the computer off.
Designers of many electronic products do not condescend to use words at all.
...Plain and simple words are avoided whenever there is some fancy, murky or esoteric word that can be used instead.
All sorts of things are computerized these days, and the same preference for murkiness often prevails in their design.
After I bought a minivan, everything seemed to go well until I found myself running out of gas.
After pulling into a filling station, I wanted to open the cover of the fuel tank — and saw nothing among the forest of anonymous control buttons and levers that would open the fuel tank.
There was nothing to do but get out the 300-page instruction book.
However, nothing in the table of contents or the index had any such pedestrian word as “fuel” or “gas.”
Eventually — and it seemed like an eternity at the time — I finally stumbled across something in the instruction book that revealed the secret identity of the lever that opened the fuel tank.
I wish someone would issue some insights to engineers designing computerized products and services.