At this building I go to, I am always hearing a brief elevator emergency bell ring. I had never thought about it. We have the same elevators at my job, and I never hear it there. One day, I decided to give the matter a little thought, and I figured it out. What are the differences between the elevators at work, and these ones?

1. The doors close a lot more slowly on these ones. The ones at work close as soon as someone presses a floor button.
2. The people only come here once a week, so they are not as familiar with the elevators as they would be at my office.

Now, couple that knowledge with the following (bad, I know, but I used my phone camera, which stinks) picture:

Can you figure out why I keep hearing the elevator alarm bell ring?

I’m in a Tokyo hotel room, and there is a small chest of drawers. I usually open the drawer and put in my clothes if the stay will be more than one night. However, this drawer won’t budge. What’s the problem?

The drawer has its handle on the top, as opposed to the bottom. This results in two face plants. The first is that we usually expect the handle (the opening affordance) to be on the bottom of the drawer. Since the groove is hidden when the drawer is closed, I did not see it until after I had tried to grip the drawer on the bottom. The second is that you need to press down in order to open the drawer. This causes it to press harder into the rails, and makes it more difficult to open.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

I was shopping in a self-checkout at a Home Depot, when I accidentally entered Spanish Language Mode. I think the software had a bug, in that the button “hot spots” were too wide. Apparently, this was a pretty big problem, as this sign shows (The “Accept” button was near the “Spanish” button):

Apparently, it is an even bigger problem, as this story shows:

Man takes pry bar to self-check till

Machine whacked after speaking to him in Spanish

“Well, let’s look at it this way: At least, this guy wasn’t buying a blowtorch.

But that age-old adage — that patience is a virtue — somehow slipped the mind of a man shopping at Home Depot on Utah Avenue South in Seattle on Thursday.”

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