I drove my roommate’s new(ish) car on the Interstate today.
I keep cars it seems like forever. Friends who haven’t seen me in a while ask, “You’re still driving that grey Civic?”
They used to say, “You’re still driving that yellow Beetle?” (“Super Beetle,” I’d reply.)
The car 3 cars before the one I’m driving now still had a choke (Look it up!), and was exempt from California’s first set of smog check rules, and I have driven over 600K miles in cars n, n-1, and n-2. (Sorry. I’m not a math major. But there’s just no other elegant way to express that. [Look it up!])
My roommate’s car has power seats, which is the next-step-up feature from my current car. It also has all kinds of eye candy on the driver’s dashboard, which makes you forget for a moment that Apollo 13 still had rows of toggle switches labeled with a Dymo Label Maker, and they still made it around the moon. It’s got screens that display the entertainment center options, like what’s playing, and driving directions, and when you will arrive, and the time and the inside and outside temperature, and how much farther you can go on this tank, and warning lights for lane drifting and blind spot lurkers and proximity alerts, and all the alerts have different beats and tones, and if I had the time and could get the car into my kitchen and could bring all my laptops and tablets and phones in as well and set all the appliances and devices to beep at the appropriate times, I could play Beethoven’s Fifth and be a YouTube Star, but Oh! The follow-up pressure!
That’s not even getting into the engine idle shutoff that saves fuel and the atmosphere, or the kick-your-foot-under-the-bumper trunk-lid-opener trick that helps people who still shop at brick-and-mortar stores.
The Coupe version even has a “Here’s your seat belt , Sir,” robotic arm that saves you the trouble of reaching back behind the seat to find the male end of the buckling system, you know, the one they taught you about on the airplane.
But the scariest thing is the GPS which, one dark night after midnight between Escondido and Temecula, I set up to track our drive. It was reading out latitude, longitude, altitude, heading, and ground speed, and what more did the bad guys need to take me out if they wanted to, so I immediately began evasive maneuvers, but try explaining that rationale to the CHP!
The User Interface (UI) is all important. We used to argue about the most appropriate user interface when all we had were 3270 and TN3270 and the interfaces for Lesser Machines. The top marketing point for Macintosh and Windows back in the day was the Graphical User Interface (GUI). If you had the GUI standardized, more people would be willing to try to use computers and then you could spend more time improving the interface and then even more people would use them and then you could make them smaller and faster and smaller and faster and then one day you can’t figure out the menu/key sequence to end a DirecTV DVR replay of a show you started watching live but also recorded and somehow managed to virtually rewind to the beginning and your roommate is saying, “Fix it! I don’t want to watch this again!” because it’s important who you watch TV with the other night I tried to watch Roommate’s Choice with roommate and unknowingly spoke during the intro “SSSH!”
…anyway, back to the car.
I won’t try working the entertainment system while I’m driving, because once I found myself looking at the names of the comedians doing bits that Laugh U.S.A. had chosen for me if I thought they were funny, and the lane drift alarm kept booping that E-flat. On the other hand, I had to go 3-levels deep into popular UI archetypes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKlmoCzBPdw) to figure out the gear shift on roommate’s car, Julia (Giula), to learn which combinations of pushes and pulls and button presses would let me go in the direction I wanted.
Roommate thought the hotel TV wasn’t working last night when the real problem was the remote could not keep up with the frantic agitation of the button presses – UI Delayed Response – so I moved to the screen and felt around and muttered, “Hmm, it’s a [inaudible]” and stepped back and pressed Power on the remote until the TV came on, then muttered, “It’s [inaudible].”
Roommate asked, “What? What did you do?”
“I reconnected the attenuator to the remote receiver diode. Now it works, but this remote responds more slowly than normal, so I just wait a little longer for the response,” and that UI explanation worked!
Later, in the car, I’m looking at comedian names again and I’m starting to sweat. I’ve had some experience with these controls – this UI – so I decide to fix it as I would in my Honda by adjusting the temperature/outlet combination instead of setting the temperature in my quarter of the cabin space, but I’m not getting any feedback from the buttons I press.
Damn!
What are these lights underneath? They look like a seat, and there’s 3 lights – feet, core, face – so I press until all three are lit.
I like this button, because something changes with each press!
But I’m still sweating. I turn a knob and detect peripheral motion on the screen above the knob. Numbers change. A temperature? Counter-clockwise. 73. 72. 71! 70! 69! 68! (My HS Football jersey number.)
Still sweating. Am I having a heart attack? Why is everyone driving so goddamn fast?
Roommate starts up from a passenger-seat nap. “Why is it so cold in here?”
Me: “I’m burning up. I can’t stop sweating.”
Roommate: “Why do you have the seat heater on?”
Me: “Seat heater? WTF?” (<– Inside words.)
In an instant, I know I have to decide if I want to be a Luddite regarding cars, bragging about crank starting the engine and winding up the window in a rainstorm even though I haven’t gapped the points in 25 years, or learn about the new UI and accept the reality, as one of my drummers once explained, that “You have keep a car payment in your budget for when you need it.” (But he kept losing the time on rolls, so?)
Last time this happened, I forced myself to set KROQ as my go to station on the speed buttons in the VW. Super Beetle.
The Billy Pulpit 