Balls

Every Tuesday night I sit down with a cluster of pill bottles and parse out my daily meds into a plastic box featuring seven lids labeled with the initials of the days of the week raised on top.

When I attempt to pour one pill at a time into each little cubicle, all too often out come tumbling two, sometimes three. Skilled as I am, after all these years, at dispensing pills, I just do not have enough control at it—and that is not because I am uncoordinated. Each pill bottle has a shoulder at the top, from which rises the drum-shaped, threaded outlet. The pills jam up inside the shoulder and will come out only when I gently shake the container; and sometimes I shake just a tad too hard for the pile-up to release a single tablet.

You know all of this. The same thing might happen to you. But here is my point:

When the industrial designer, all proud of herself and imagining herself to be so superior to all of us because she could design things and we could not—when she, I say, sculpted the pill bottle for the first time, then cast the prototype all lah-de-dah and full of herself, she was not thinking about what it would be like to use that bottle as a consumer. She was just “doing her job.”

Someone who does think about what it feels like to pour medications from a bottle, me for instance, would design the inside of a pill bottle with one side—at least—ramping up from inside the body of the container to the outlet. No shoulder. The ramp would also narrow as it approached the top, so that a single file of tablets would line up. Such a dispenser would allow one to tip a single pill with control to spare.

Thoughtless designs that ignore the user are everywhere. The windshield wiper lever is so close behind the steering wheel in my truck that when I have to make a sudden move—like driving on our hairpin-infested “back way”—I frequently nick the lever with my little finger and the wipers spring to action smearing back-way dust back and forth in front of me. Thanks moron auto designer who drives his pickup truck only to the mall.

I can lock my cell phone so that I pull it from my pocket without activating a button or swiping the touch screen. But when the phone rings, everything on there comes live and the act of extracting the phone from my shirt pocket now changes several settings in ways that it takes half an hour to figure out and change back. It also hangs up on my caller. Thanks a lot you programmer who thinks you’re so clever to build all that software into our phones with no regard to how they interfere with actually using the damn thing as a phone.

Last example: I spent twenty-five years teaching mathematics to the youth of Los Angeles County, and very proud of it. During that time my colleagues and I survived twenty-five and more “reforms” and improvements to the art of teaching. These reforms were instigated by mayors and captains of industry, ivory tower teachers of teachers and psychologists who sent white mice through mazes, parent groups and school administrators  whose sole teaching experience might be three years as a gym teacher—no foolin’. Never, not once, in all that time, ever, was a teacher consulted. And we teachers had a pretty darn good idea of what was wrong, because we lived it every day.

I have two points, and I believe I have made my first one: the world is full of meddling know-it-alls who have no clue what effect their pet projects are having on the people they supposedly serve. I want to suggest that a Los Angeles County Supervisor, with two million subjects—er, constituents—can be grossly out of touch with lives on the ground in the same way. Like, say, allowing a small community to be land-locked for ten very difficult years.

My second, and more important point, is that these screw-ups can be fixed. It may take more work to fix something than it did to set it up right in the first place, but if it was possible to screw it up, it is also possible to fix it.

But that takes EFFORT. And BALLS.

BALLS. That’s right. I said BALLS.

We applaud the staff of Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich for having the courage to right the wrong at the railroad crossing, and for shoving his Deputy Norm Hickling out into the lights to face our community. They could not have chosen a better or more graceful ambassador. But now let’s finish this thing, thoroughly and expeditiously.

It will require intelligence, compassion, and BALLS.