How to reset the clock on your oven? Hang on, I’ll write out the equation for you
D = the density of the button interface designer’s brain
“Would you like to watch a film with me tonight?”
Although the timing seems good – it has just gone 8pm – the offer is extraordinary. You see, in the busy Dabbs household, Monsieur et Madame D work to his or her own barely compatible calendar and so it is mandatory to book in advance before any interaction can take place between husband and wife. And I do mean any. Yet here I am, on the spur of the moment, deciding to watch a film I recorded on the telly and inviting my spouse to watch it at the same time.
Amazingly, she is free and willing and I’m thinking maybe I should have suggested something more interesting to do with my hands for the next two hours than fiddle around with a cable TV remote. But before we even get a chance to sit down – together! in the same room! at the same time! – we are plunged into darkness.
You can determine a person’s age and background by their response to a domestic power cut. If they shout “What the hell?” then they are definitely townies and aged under 30.
For people of my age, for whom the big Hawaii is long past, my response is to hunt irrationally for candles that I know we don’t have… while an image of rubbery chocolate mousse in little moulded plastic tubs pops into mind.
Power cuts + plasticky rubber chocolate mouse = growing up in Britain in the 1970s. I must have my head mounted sideways.
Not having grown up in Britain and not being a townie, Mme D trots off to find a torch. Good, I say to myself, we can use that to hunt for some candles.
We have definitely experienced more power cuts in the last few years in France than we did in the previous 30 in south-east London. I clearly remember the last one being about 10 years ago, principally because my second offspring demonstrated beautifully what it is to be under 20 by failing to realise there was a power cut at all. Despite the whole street being blacked out, he remained sitting in front of his laptop in his room, oblivious to the candle-hunt taking place elsewhere in the house. It was a good half hour before he sauntered into the almost pitch-black kitchen (where he found me, lit candle in hand, trying to raid the fridge in the fruitless hope of discovering some chocolate mousse) to announce: “My bedside lamp isn’t working.”
Back to the present, I snatch the nearest phone handset from its cradle to call my electricity supplier but can’t seem to get a dial tone. This is because none of the phone basestations are working, natch. By the time I remember where I last left my mobile, I reason that someone else in the street will have called them already.
The real fun starts five minutes later when power is restored, accompanied by a cacophony of bleeps and whirring all over the house. Both desktop computers restart automatically, which I make a note of – I don’t want them to do this in future – while the NAS box revives as it should, which is a relief. Net access is back within 60 seconds. The phones wake up. The hot water system sorts itself out. I know that even the TV set-top box will be ready to play the film after five minutes of clicking and buzzing followed by another five minutes of pretending not to work.
Reluctantly, I drag myself to the kitchen – and not to source more candles. It is my masculine task to reset the clocks on the microwave and convection oven, the only two utterly dimwit devices in the house. No auto reset for them, oh no, all you have to do is pull the wrong plug or flick the wrong switch on the wall for a split second and it’s right back to the old-school blinking ‘12:00’.
Neither device has a meaningful user interface for setting the time, either, so I’m faced with ten minutes of experimentation or ten minutes hunting in the cellar for the instruction leaflets. Perhaps it’s just me. I once spent so long trying to update my digital watch to show European time that the flight attendant had to ask me to leave the plane.
Worse, the oven and microwave require multiple button presses, each producing an unnecessarily loud beep that resonates against the back of my skull, and I keep getting it wrong so have to start again. Beep, beep, beep. Over and over. Beep, beep. Aargh I’m going mad. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Shut uuuuuup. Beep, beep, beep…
The microwave bears the name Daewoo and it passes through my mind that the device might well have been designed by a certain Mr Woo and at this particular moment I wish he would die. Can you hear me, doctor?
Eventually, I persuade the microwave to accept the time. It’s all down to getting the sequence right: press ‘Clock’, press some other button whose label has long ago worn away, simultaneously press ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’, open and close the door, await the Moon to reach the seventh house, allow Jupiter to align with Mars, click my heels three times, cough twice for matron, press in the time backwards and there you go.
Except ten minutes have lapsed while I’ve been doing this and so all I’ve successfully managed to do is enter the time from ten minutes in the past and now I have to update it. Beep, beep, beep, frigging beep, and so it goes on.
Don’t even get me started on the convection oven. It beeps when you press buttons but also beeps as it heats up, it beeps as it cools down and even beeps in multiples when you turn a dial. I suspect it simply enjoys beeping. Maybe when we go out of the house and no one else is around, it beeps contentedly to itself.
Of course, resetting these devices is simplicity itself compared with the dipshit Weather Station that I foolishly purchased on a whim years ago while buying bits of cabling at Maplins. (Blimey that dates it.) Nothing marks a man as middle aged quite so obviously as buying a Weather Station: it’s a natural progression after the motorbike purchased during the mid-life crisis. For a man, the purchase of a Weather Station represents an admission of existential defeat.
I content myself with the fact that it is a wall-mounted Weather Station.
Anyway, this stupid bugger is fitted with a set of arcane control buttons inaccessibly located on the rear, so I have to unmount it from the wall to locate them. Then again, it helps not a jot to actually see the buttons as they are cryptically labelled ‘Unit’, ‘A1/A2’, ‘UP’ (there is no ‘DOWN’ button) and ‘T2’ (there is no ‘T1’ either).
The device permanently indicates that it is raining, despite all evidence to the contrary outdoors, and thinks it is some time in the afternoon of 14 June 2020. Indeed, it always will because I have never been able to fathom the settings despite closely following the concise instructions that have been written in perfectly good Chinglish. And even if I could, the piercing ‘cheep!’ sound it emits with every press is loud and annoying enough to get neighbours knocking on your door to ask if you need any help stamping on it.
I am tempted to take out the batteries and leave the unit amid the bamboo in the back garden so it can experience the weather for itself.
Surely devising a simple way of setting the bloody time on a digital device isn’t rocket science (except for one in the cockpit of a rocket, in which case I suppose it is). Bring out your forces, bring out your crosses now! All electronic devices these days should know what the bloody time is. And if they can’t, what the clucking bell is wrong with having a button on the front of a timer device labelled, ooh I dunno, something such as ‘Set the time’?
I know, I know. Daft idea. Head mounted sideways, me.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. You may be wondering what film he wanted to watch with his wife when the house was suddenly plunged into utter darkness. Aptly enough, it was Night of the Living Dead. Right between the eyes, eh?
Hmm my battery alarm clock is a radio (rugby time signal) controlled one so once power is restored it sets the time in about 5 minutes. However resetting the alarms is another matter.
Press the middle button until the alarm is shown, then hold the middle button to engage setting modes, use the 1st (up) and 2nd (down) arrows to set the hours, then press the middle button again to select the minutes, and again to set the time, the 4th button will then turn the alarm on. If you want to set the second button press it all again.
However if the display is the date then holding the middle button will change it to 24 hour clock instead of AM or PM
No I don’t know what the 5th button does and I have had the thing for about 15 years…..
Mind you the number of times I have gone to program the end time on the cooker and changed the clock are too many to mention….
Oven? There's your problem Mr Dabbs. All the hip kids are airfrying. And with those you just sync the clock with the one on your phone over WiFi/Bluetooth/semaphore.
'70s power cuts: Shopping in Woolies by torchlight. Happy days!