Made By Monkeys

Engineers buy and use development kits and evaluation boards to minimise their risk and speed the design cycle -- many say they expect to get something working on a new board in a mere 30 minutes or less. So when the documentation sucks, often contradicting itself or leaving out critical details, it can be insanely frustrating. And it's especially wrenching when the hardware is interesting and useful, as engineer/writer Jon Titus recently discovered trying out a new microcontroller dev kit from Freescale.

"I have a Freescale kit here that could let engineers compare performance of
8- and 32-bit MCUs in the company's new Flexis family. The same code should
run in either processor type, which sounds like an interesting capability
for engineers. But the written instructions are so awful many engineers
will give up. And, nowhere in the instructions does the kit explain its
purpose or provide examples readers can use to compare performance, code
size, and other characteristics for each of the two processor types.

The curse of bad instructions struck again in the booklet that accompanies a shelf unit Jon Titus bought from IKEA.

The original instructions for Step 1 show how to attach two brackets and eight screws and dowel pins to the top, bottom, and sides of the shelf. But, if you're not mechanically inclined, it's easy to miss where the items go. Jon's marked-up instructions, below, explicitly show where the pieces go. The brackets (A) look fairly obvious, but someone with poor vision might miss where to put the other parts, B and C.

Things get even sillier, as underscored in another cartoon from the instructions:

You want to go where? The Boston Globe's article Street Smarts? illustrates perfectly why even locals are flummoxed by the exploding number of increasingly ambiguous road signs around town. But now at least we know why -- they're designed by a committee!

EW Editor Alun Williams found the use of the double negative on this loyalty card for Nando's - a Peri-Peri Chicken cheap and cheerful restaurant chain - to be a bit of a mind-bending exercise. "The deliberate / coy attempt at miscommunication got me wondering, 'Should I tick the box or not?' But, somehow, the promise of 'enjoying free chicken' didn't seem worth the effort of figuring it out."

And you thought you were having a bad day?

Fox News reports that an angry employee (no kidding), wreaked havoc at an architectural firm when she deleted 7 years of drawings and blueprints valued at $2.5 million.

"She decided to mess up everything for everybody," Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. "She just sabotaged the entire business."

Though the company was able to retrieve the data, it cost them a bundle. And it certainly does make you think twice about data security, or the lack thereof.