• guy@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Like my oven clock. Six buttons with cryptic symbols on them. You can press them, push them and hold multiple buttons together and it does different things with different equally cryptic symbols appearing on the LCD. Sometimes somebody accidently pushes a button and it gets stuck in a weird state where it refuses to cook. At least I’ve worked out the correct key combo to set the current time

    • Duranie@literature.cafe
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      11 months ago

      Reminds me of a job I had years ago. As a massage therapist at a health club, we had a CD player in the room to play various kinds of music. The CD player died, maintenance decided to replace it with a DVD player. Mind you, DVD players do play CDs, and they were able to hook it up to the sound system in the room. The problem is that with no screen it was impossible to navigate system settings. Most CDs being less than an hour long and most massages being an hour meant we had to stop what we were doing when the music ended during the last 5-10 minutes of the massage and hit play again.

      In one magic moment I managed to blindly hit the right combo of buttons on the remote to get it to loop playback, but as the player shuts off after a period of not being used, overnight the setting was forever lost.

      • pomodoro_longbreak
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        11 months ago

        I love these kinds of very specific slice of life stories from work. It’s so weird how these things can feel like such a big part of your life, but most of us just forget about them as soon as we walk out the door, let alone change jobs. Work is so weird lol

      • pomodoro_longbreak
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        11 months ago

        I would warn against it, minor cogito hazard if subject tries to understand symbols

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    It all makes a lot more sense when you look at it as humanity squatting in their own ruins. Their systems have failed, nobody who truly understands the inner workings is around anymore, yet the machine is so well oiled and easy to operate that it continues to function regardless.

    • pomodoro_longbreak
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      11 months ago

      humanity squatting in their own ruins

      Love this. It’s kind of giving Ruin Haunters from All Tomorrows.

  • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Also, if you press the wrong button sequence the ancient sauna stops working forever, or it might set the heat to lethal levels, or it might get possessed by an AI that wants to kill you