Stringing a lanyard to the bus stop

To suffer, they must

I had as much as a hypothesis and experience has shown that it would never become a law. Many things are designed to be assembled or disassembled easily – well, apart from Olivetti PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, they were a conundrum of the inexplicably impossible.

Then, whoever awarded the contract for the building of bus stops in the Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport areas should be put in a perpetual motion dunking stool.

The bus stops would work in the desert but not here; a few years ago, I wrote about this but it is just getting really silly, none of the bus stops offer any shelter in the rain, they serve as funnels for the rain water – it is better to be soaked in the rain shower than stand the “protective” shelter of those bus stops.

If you are not wearing waterproof clothes, there is no point sitting down, the seats are dishes of water and the bus stop in front of my new office is so water-logged after the rains, a walk there might just be an aqua-plane cum surf – you wonder if anyone does quality control of these places as the designer and builder walks away pockets filled to the bank laughing.

Obviously, neither the designer nor the builder would ever have to try these places in weathered conditions, the design probably came off some sketch that looked aesthetically pleasing to the eye and that was all; all form and no function – one could cuss.

The riddle of the lanyard

Then my KPN mobile internet dongle came with a string lanyard to attach the cover of the connector to the body of the dongle. Everyone tried every kind of technique to string the lanyard without luck, some improvised but it did not look like in the picture.

Surely, it could not be that hard as I tried every possible permutation of stringing the thing through – this morning, I thought I had a solution of trying to string it through, taking apart the whole thing and still without success.

The more I looked at it the more I thought, it could not have been so badly designed that we could not put the lanyard on and just before the blog incubation in readiness for castigation of the thing was completed, I had an insight about the possibility of not having to string through the lanyard.

Lifting the cover that had the access to a recessed memory card, there is was, a simple hook held in place by the cover and all that aggravation ended with a sense of victory and accomplishment.

The hypothesis still finds true but sometimes you have to stop head-banging and start thinking, if only one picture were added to the manual and we would have saved us the hours of stupidity with the simplicity of the smart application of instructions and pictures.