ATTACK OF THE MARAUDING POST-APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE CHIMPS

“I don’t know, it’s like how people don’t seem to think about how things are made or what they’re for.”

“They do, don’t they?”

“No. I don’t think so. Even when those things are perfectly simple and have just one purpose. Most things just seem to happen and are taken up.”

“Like what? You must have a specific example.”

“The example I always use is door handles, because I think they’re the most universal, but it’s everything from bike parking to banking apps.”

“So what specifically?”

“Well, just imagine all the push-only doors in the city you live in. There's loads.”

“Sure.”

“And how many of those have a knob or pull that doesn’t need to be there? Most?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“And what’s the purpose of all that? And what’s the cost? Cost, not just in terms of the dollars spent by builders or building owners but also every human yank needlessly induced and the minor frustration or embarrassment of that?”

“You think that’s so significant that you’re regularly worrying about it?”

“It’s a bigger problem than cancer or hunger, in my mind. The problem is not seen until you zoom out. $50 or $500 for a brass knob is nothing in the context of a new build full of many many elements and that will sell for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And any one frustrated pull on an unyielding door is similarly meaningless. Of course. But multiply that dollar cost by all the doors I'm talking about. I mean, there has to be more doors than people, right? And if just one percent are broken as I describe, now you're talking billions of dollars. And then think about the lifetime of a door, a decade or a century, and being yarded on three or maybe three hundred or three thousand times a day. And consider that this translates into a million people failing to open a door and for no reason at all every second of your life. Now you have a set of obvious, significant, costly, and embedded problems impacting almost everyone, that just moments ago seemed so trivial as to not even bother noticing, never mind mentioning.”

“Perhaps.”

“'Perhaps?' You don’t feel your day is chocked full of these ‘irrelevant’ costs and inconveniences? I mean, isn’t this nearly everything all the time? And the fixes, most disturbingly, they aren’t an additional cost or layer of complexity or a diploma or licence people need to earn. I'm just imploring folks who tell me they're concerned about money, focused on efficiency and cutting needless expenses, to not throw away money. I'm just asking people who say they're concerned about other people to not waste peoples’ precious time and energy. I mean, to see this clearly just look at the fix people bring in.”

"The 'PUSH' sign!"

"Right. All they had to do was remove the pull bar. To do less. But what was the response? To do more. A lot more. They added not just a cost (the sign and its installation) but also another process for the user. Worse, typically a uni-lingual sign to interpret. I mean, the phenomena is so rampant and normalized that its a comic cliché: pushing the pull next to the 'pull' sign"

“Yeah.”

“Let me know if you live in an oasis where you experience none of this. Please draw me a map. I mean, what does your phone’s data plan, the Netflix or iTunes user interface, and your last job application look like on your end?”

“I get it, there are flaws, but you can’t think about it like that. I mean, you can, but you cannot live your life noticing all this and allowing it to frustrate you.”

“It’s definitely enlightened to let things one cannot change flow past rather than impact you. But everything I’ve mentioned is just a human choice (not a law of physics), and someone not noticing or not giving a shit, or more often a whole lot of someones continually failing to notice and forever not giving a shit (even when attempting to solve the problem). Right?”

“I guess.”

“And isn’t everything else, everything folks concern themselves with, reorganize their life around, take to the streets protesting, downstream of all this 'small' ‘unimportant’ stuff? And, I guess the point is: doesn’t all the higher level stuff all go away if you address the ‘trivial’ bits, the bits you have to step over a million million times all the way along the route to these ‘more important’ issues?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, as I say, we all touch so much of this and so frequently that it’s all simultaneously trivial and tremendous. So, for example, you want to fund the arts or end homelessness in your city? But how do you fund that? Well, you could double peoples' taxes, adding something and creating more problems, or could you just do less needless stuff and eliminate waste? Take the cost of the data we didn’t use and that was not carried over on our monthly phone plan and add that to the reduced cost of never installing 200,000,000 pull bars on push-only doors and you just funded both — while dramatically reducing everything from mild, almost unnoticeable frustration to fully unleashed insanity induced by a trillion ‘insignificant’ annoyances. Now add to this picture curb cuts and accessibility ramps, bollards and bike parking, and, and, and...”

“Tell me about bike parking.”

“Well, what do you think those huge steel coils cost to make, buy, and install? $1,000? $10,000?”

“Sure, somewhere in there.”

“And how often are they installed so that they back onto a tulip bed or bush, wall or road?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I can tell you. All the fucking time. And it’s not uncommon to see two or three of them in the same location neutralized just so. And then one may wish to ask if the inventors, fabricators, installers, or owners intended to ruin, by default, half the parking they’ve provided? Or maybe we just want to ask if any of them even noticed. Presumably not, but—”

“I see.”

“And just consider the cost, again. They spent $5,000 say, on a giant chunk of steel enabling at least eight people to hitch their bikes. And they probably painted it and installed it at some cost, too. Right? And several, maybe a dozen, people were involved in that process. And they elected to go to completion by only allowing maybe four bikes to reasonably park. And we might also presume the bike parking was installed after years of inquiry and demand, so you can imagine folks showing up to find no available parking when they need it, as happens all the time. And then consider the fix. Twice as much parking at no additional cost, requires the installer to think just a moment and bump the rails out four feet or simply swivel it perpendicular to the curb, instead of right at and with the curb. This scenario is rampant in every city and town with bike parking. And it’s fucked up. And then these same folks, after a decade of demand, install bike shelters on their bike parking. And nearly every time that shelter doesn't and cannot shelter the bikes parked there. It’s as fucked up as a thing can be, really. Like, the first time you see it you think it must be a gag being filmed for some comedy special, but then this is every instance you come across in every city you visit.”

“I get it.”

“Do you? I don't think you do."

"What's not to understand?"

"Well, just reframe it. Imagine you're a cafe owner. You pay for, have built and installed 25 feet of bench seating, seating for 12 customers. Now imagine upon completion being content with, or just never noticing, you have only six functional seats. What would that mean? Like, where would we be? How broken would the world have to be? And how distracted and uncaring would everyone involved, including yourself and your staff seem?”

“Right.”

“Now imagine your cafe also has a pull bar on the push door, accessible toilets a wheelchair cannot get into, a perfectly unintuitive POS system your staff constantly struggles with and every new recruit is totally lost on… And what if some version of that is paying out in every cafe and diner and fine dining establishment in town? And what if this isn't unique to the food industry but happens at the college and university and the bank and post office and the offices of the power company and the Ministry of Labour? Well, suddenly it looks far less like a little one-off error, by otherwise thoughtful people just doing their best, and more like rampant chaos perpetuated by marauding post-apocalyptic zombie chimps. Doesn't it?”

"Well, I don't know."