User’s user guide

As my little boy keeps growing, I need to lengthen the straps on his pushchair. Where is that user guide? A quick search on the web and I needn’t stress, as a helpful mum has recorded her own guide for the task on ‘You Tube’. Really useful, as it actually shows you how to release that tricky clip that the normal user guide claims is so easy.

Is this the end of the manufacturer's paper user guide?

Apple lift affords trouble

The arrival of an iPod nano in Santa’s sack this Christmas meant a trip to the Apple Store, Milton Keynes to buy a nano cover. I’ll say cover, although it could just as easily been a case, pouch, jacket, folio, sleeve, holster, vest, or even an armband. (Surely the nano is also crying out for a gilet – or a body warmer for anybody who was anybody in the early 80s.)

Anyway, it wasn’t the nano couture that confused me and the rest of family Stanton, it was the lift. You see, I was under the impression that Apple are dedicated to making things easier and more fun to use. The store is certainly very smart, but something seemed to go awry when they got to the lift, which you can just about see in the far left corner of this picture.

Firstly, there’s no call button anywhere near the door. Luckily, we’re a bright bunch, and it only took us a minute or two to twig that the two foot long vertical brushed-steel bar on the left of the door is a handle and meant we needed to pull the door open to reveal the lift within. However, despite a festive diet of sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes to build up our strength, no amount of tugging from the four of us could wrench the door open. Suddenly it hit us; the steel bar posing as a door handle required us not to pull but to push instead. Of course, just like the Start button in Windows is where you go to shut down! It must be a door bar for geniuses – or a genius bar as Apple seem to like to call them.

Once inside the vestibule, the lift is reassuringly uncomplicated – it has up and down buttons, slidey doors, and a sign telling you to add up how much you all weigh before you set off. Except that the lift compartment is open so you can see and touch the sides of the lift shaft as the lift compartment goes up. Unfortunately, just like the handle outside ‘demanded’ that I pull it, the affordance of moving walls proved too much temptation for a four-year. She poked out a finger triggering some kind of sensor and the lift stopped.

Under normal circumstances, having this kind of trouble with a lift might have given me cause for concern over the family’s collective problem-solving skills, but the fact that one of the store assistants took the trouble to explain how the lift worked before we began our descent from the first floor back to ground eased my fears. Obviously, it’s not just the Macs they’re used to explaining. They're even pictured here apparently celebrating one man's successful trip.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that if the lifts at Apple’s HQ are anything like the ones in the Apple Store, MK, that could explain why Steve Jobs is not at Macworld 2009. He’s just got stuck.