Did I say there’s been a new boiler installed now? I don’t know how it works. I’ve been in tears. I’m wearing gloves. It’s 12c inside this house. Idiots guides on YouTube yield nothing of value.

I feel I might feel bad. I’ve just exploded at the girl on the phone. She said in her young sounding and sing song Scottish voice ‘that’s so strange, because it’s the most basic thermostat we have’. I said ‘are you calling me basic?’ and she stammered ‘no, no, I just meant it’s meant to be really simple’.

‘Oh, basic and simple’.

‘No, that’s not what I mean’.

‘It must be what you mean. If the thermostat is basic and simple and I can’t work it, I must be even more basic and simple than it’.

Then she said ‘I totally get that you’re upset - my granny is exactly the same with technical things’.

That set off a more vociferous reaction from me.

An electrician is coming.

Yes the boiler fires up. Makes an unbelievable racket every twenty minutes. I chose this stupid thing and was trusted to as part of the redesign of the house this person belongs to. When they rent it out to paying guests, nobody is going to have a blind clue how to get heat - and from the comments section on the YouTube idiots guides, an equal number of people have no way of getting the heat off once it’s on.

Someone had written what I think is the heart of the problem. It gives all the hallmarks of something designed by someone so native with technology that they didn’t even consider that for anyone who isn’t, it’s not intuitive and actually requires quite a lot of work to understand. This is basically the product of someone so young and naive that a simple on/off up/down switch is something they’ve rarely seen. They make everything much more complicated than it ever needed to be, because they’ve understood things like it from birth basically, not sparing a second to think that tens of millions of non geeks will struggle.

It should not be this hard - and this is really part of why I hate tech people - they genuinely think they’ve made it easier, and look/listen in barely concealed pity and astonishment when told they’ve actually f***ed up a concept as simply understood as an off/on switch or up/down button.

SiberianPrincess’sMidriff wrote:

Won't Duvets start to go all funny in storage?

I inspected three of them the other week and they appeared to be fine.

It’s definitely not just me because the son has returned from his day out and can’t work it either. That’s two hotel rooms I’ll be asking for the money for when they ring back to explain why the engineer they were sending hours ago hasn’t bothered to arrive. I could do with a drink, so I might see if some picturesque pub style thing with rooms upstairs has vacancies.

Do you know what brand and model it is?

Honeywell t4 something. I am boiling - with rage.

I'm off to watch some videos about it.

I'm watching one, right now.



Just mere seconds in and the words, "Start-up Wizard," have been mentioned. In my experience, any computerised process that features the word, "Wizard, is going to be impossible to use.

I've been sorting out my Big Finish collection out on Discogs, only had to add an additional two.