invisible functions

i was thinking, as i was locked out of the house yesterday, about the way things work when you aren't using them. the default settings. the basics. the usability of things that don't get used...

are there people who think about that kind of thing?

probably. the same people who think about screensavers and sleep modes and the how the color of your sofa looks against the paint on your wall. things that don't really matter until you turn away or get out of your seat.

the door to this house has a default setting of locked. this bugs me a little bit. i'm almost afraid to even venture outside because if no one else is home, the doors won't let me back in. no doubt the default settings of our house make my mother feel very safe and all... but geez. to me, the locks are just inconvenient.

much like the shape of our soup ladle. it gets caught in the drawer. it makes getting any other utensils out of that drawer quite risky.

half of me is looking at all this and saying, life is full of inconvenience. get used to it. don't whine. the other half of me is whimpering, remembering the hour and a half i spent locked outside in the rain the other day: why why why?

maybe i only use the door to our house perhaps twice every twenty-four hours. maybe it doesn't really matter how it works when i'm not using it. maybe this place my family lives in is a place where your house does need to be locked up all the time. i'm not really sure.

well-designed things should be easy and they should be beautiful. call me impatient, but i don't really want a lot of fuss involved when i go in and out of my house. having my own house key smooths the process nicely. one of those cool thumbprint unlocking mechanisms would be even cooler. a nice place in the country where nobody needs to lock there doors would be supremely ideal.

and what about the soup ladle?

as i hardly ever use the soup ladle, i haven't thought up a solution yet. maybe we need bigger kitchen drawers. maybe we need a collapsable ladles. jamming the silly thing against the potato masher and the several spatulas is less a crisis than being locked out in the rain, i think.