Poorly designed things that make using them difficult?

[Whatisthisfuckery]

Spice jars, who in hell has designed the dimensions of spice jars? What measurement of spices does one usually find in a recipe? Teaspoons. What can you not quite fit in a spice jar? A fucking teaspoon. Whose bloody bright idea was it to design a jar that makes it hard to dispense the most common measurement of the ingredient contained within?

Ahh, that’s better, I needed that rant.

Go on, rant away. What poorly designed thing makes you angry inside?

Those ridged plastic tags that hold things to the cardboard packaging eg can openers

Even my strong diy scissors got damaged

Pumps that you have turn a gazillion times

When bulky things are packed in polystyrene packaging and then put into a box and you can’t easily take it out of the box

The perforated seals going down low lengthways on makeup such as pencils and mascaras

Haynes manuals. I bought one for my Zafira but it’s too big to fit in the glove compartment. I mean, really?

Those ridged plastic tags that hold things to the cardboard packaging eg can openers

Scissors often come packaged like this, too, with a message saying use scissors to open😂

HRTWT But my bugbear are the taps in my house put in by previous owners. I have 3 sets and they are all useless. One is a waterfall effect which has no pressure another is one where you can hold it in your hand but if you turn it on too full it jumps off and soaks you and lastly a cute hook shaped one that you can’t get your hands underneath properly. They are going to be replaced when I can afford it.
With corned beef tins, I use an opener to open both ends then push the meat out of the big end from the smaller end. No buggering around with the key and trying to get meat out with a knife and in one whole piece.

Not all Morrisons are the same though, we have proper belts where you can get a full shop on.

Very slightly off-topic, but am I the only one who, when using the 'bigger/trolley shop' self-service checkouts, doesn't bother unloading the trolley on to the conveyer belt? CBs make perfect sense if there's somebody waiting to scan it, but where's the actual benefit to me to unload it all on to the belt, scan it and then put it into a bag on the capricious scales?

Also on that topic, Asda SS checkouts that offer you the option to use your own bag and ask you to put your empty bags down to 'zero' the scales before you add your shopping - and then are astonished to find that bags weigh something. If they didn't, there would be no need to add them in the first place.

you can get handle covers. Aga do a nice fabric one but there are loads on Amazon either fabric or silicone

We have these silicone ones, but they're a faff, so I usually just use an oven glove or tea towel. Also they add extra weight to a small pan, thus exacerbating the risk of an empty 'handle-heavy' pan tipping over on to the handle. I never know what they're supposed to be called - I think they had a twee little name when we bought them (from Lakeland??) - we just refer to them as 'pandoms'

My user name is very apt tonight. I, too, have a teaspoon measure which fits into spice jars but, sad person that I am, I decided to try my various spice and dried herb jars with a normal teaspoon. It fits into all bar three, one jar being Co-op own brand, one jar being from Lidl and an old fashioned Schwartz jar (all the others are modern Schwartz jars and take a teaspoon with ease). Just out of interest I looked for a date on the old Schwartz jar and it's 29/10/2015! So I've thrown that away, thanks OP! Can't think what I ever wanted caraway seeds for anyway!

Condoms, the packets are not made to get open in the dark in a hurry

The hook for your bag on a supermarket trolley. You can't use it if you have a toddler in the seat.

Every baby bag I've ever owned. L

@dodobookends : Dunelm is another option for your dual lipped milkpan requirements.

Great thread.
I’m adding containers holding ordinary double/single/whipping/cream. I’m not sure why anyone thought that a round, wobbly thin plastic pot was a great idea. Often has leaked on shelf before buying. Similarly flimsy peely lid, which is no use unless you are using the whole pot in one go.
Suggestion seen in US/Aus/NZ:
screw-top square milk-style container
waxed cardboard square carton

90 degree too-small parking spaces - why not angled and big enough to fit many modern cars?

Petrol pumps being too big and needing to hold to operate (echoing many others) - other countries have a little clip on the pump to give you the option of hands-free fixing open if filling tank. Or even, dare I say it, an actual person that fills your tank to required level (and gives windscreen/headlights/ mirrors a quick clean) whilst you pay. Great job for teens.

Do they still make those little brown nasty milk thimbles with the ridged sides and a foil/plastic lid with a tab to pull? I haven't drunk tea or coffee for decades, so I wouldn't know; but I remember they always used to work on a very strict 50:50 principle - half in the drink and half in your face/clothes.

Also, adaptor/transformer-type plugs that are designed to stop you from being able to use at least one other adjacent plug socket. I get that they sometimes need some bulk to them for circuitry/ventilation inside, but I'd prefer them to stick out more proud from the wall rather than be fatter or longer - or just have a standard plug with a short lead to a halfway box like with a lot of laptop chargers.

See also mobile phone charging leads. The default length always seems to be either 50cm or 75cm, which is useless and often doesn't stretch far enough from the socket to be able to put the phone on a nearby flat surface, except on the floor, which is a recipe for disaster; never mind not being able to use/glance at it whilst it's charging. 1m or 1.5m makes such a massive difference to the practicality of it.

I haven't read the full thread so apologies if this has been covered but, it annoys me that we have these huge sofas in prime positions in our homes, and they don't come with built-in storage! Sofabeds, in particular, should have room to keep bedding in. That would make hosting so much easier!

Moreover, who ever decided that paying £20 online for a replacement phone battery that would take 20 seconds to flip off the back and swap over was too much hassle - and that progress dictates that you should now have to pay £100+ and be without your phone whilst you send it away to a 'repair' centre?

I get that there's more profit in it for the phone manufacturers (assuming you don't take it to Timpsons), but considering how much the 'flagship' models cost to buy, they really are sticking two fingers up at the customers.

Do the cheapo 'emergency'/spare phones you pick up in Asda have more advanced technology which enables them to have a user-swappable battery, or is it just that they know people with those phones won't be willing/able to pay them to fit a new integrated one which will cost them a lot more than the phone did?

Also, why are there three different sizes of SIM card? You might have an 'adaptor' to hand if you need to swap it to a different phone in a hurry, but you may well not - especially if you're not at home. It's not even down to not having enough space for a bigger card-surround, as the biggest phones tend to have the nano cards and the tiny phones usually take the biggest ones.

Bad design and difficult to use:

1. Fridge drawers with so many nooks and crannies, they are difficult to clean.

1. Men 😂😂😂.

@Coyoacan

Architect-designed buildings that don't work. I can't figure out what architects actually do.

Our building was recently remodelled and the architects saw fit to put slippery tiles on the stairs.

Not wishing to derail this excellent thread (thank you @Whatisthisfuckery ) but the slippery tiles on the stairs are a breach of CDM regs and building regs; do please complain loudly until someone sorts it out

Every time I open a plastic soup pot I rage at the fact that the lids are so tight and inflexible that 9 times out of 10 they spray soup everywhere when you finally manage to pull the bastarding things off.

Interactive whiteboards in classrooms fitted at a convenient height for an average male teacher, especially if you can’t “scroll down” on the page, like my current one. I end up scribbling wildly and indecipherably at the bottom. (Google tells me that the male:female ratio in UK secondaries is about 2:3.)
TBF, the problem existed with old style chalk boards too. The ones on rollers were fab, but tended to exist only in Science labs, presumably to accommodate the diagrams.

@mildlymiffed Bloody Douwe Egberts coffee jar!!!! I only bought it once but spilt at least 3 coffees worth of granules every time I opened it.

@borntobequiet

Interactive whiteboards in classrooms fitted at a convenient height for an average male teacher, especially if you can’t “scroll down” on the page, like my current one. I end up scribbling wildly and indecipherably at the bottom. (Google tells me that the male:female ratio in UK secondaries is about 2:3.) TBF, the problem existed with old style chalk boards too. The ones on rollers were fab, but tended to exist only in Science labs, presumably to accommodate the diagrams.

I now have a HUE visualiser and it is amazing. Instead of having to reach the board with my back to the class I can sit at my desk, writing on paper and it magically appears on the board. Especially good for modelling graphs and that sort of thing. I can also shine it onto examples of student work to show what they have done well and so on.

Computer keyboards have a numberpad to the right of the letters, which takes up the area of the desk where the mouse needs to go.

Tried to get a keyboard without a numberpad. They don't exist - unless you want a diddy one designed to fit in your back pocket (ie silly flat keys, not a proper keyboard for someone who types all day in the job).

Found exactly what I needed on Amazon from a very random Chinese retailer, ordered it but all the keys were hooked up wrong so it types gobbledigook. Returned and bought another, same thing.

Can I just take an axe to my standard keyboard to remove the offending numberpad?

Understandable if you never use it RTFT but number pads are incredibly useful if you are typing a lot of figures. Even just doing a bit of home banking, they speed up the process considerably.

COVID tests where you have to snap the plastic off of the cotton bud to make it fit into the bottle, and once you’ve done that try and work out how to make up the postage box!

Another ham one. Every single slice in the packet folded together so you have to touch them all to peel away 2 slices and then they're so slimy you end up with ham debris under your nails. Rage inducing and gross