At the end of exams when there is nothing to do I play with my calculator (its more fun than checking the answers) and for a while now I have been interested in the Abs button in the top left corner. Because while it may be there, it doesn’t seem to do anything. I have tried many things, squares, cosines and division and none of them seem to be at all affected by the Abs button. So why is it there?
However, today (i.e. last Thursday) I finally worked out what it does. It’s a very useful idea actually, if you press it and type a negative number in the box…. It takes away the minus sign.
Why does my calculator have a function for this? It’s not like I can change a number to positive once I’ve typed it because you have to press the button before you press the minus sign. But even there it would be stupid because it would take all of a second to retype the number. Or even better, just go back and delete the negative.
But this made me think about things that were equally pointless. What about the royally unsuccessful DVD rewinder? Or the amazing Q-Top cucumber cup for people too cool for food bags? My favourite of all the stupid, needless, incomprehensible items is the common tie.
Occasionally I wonder how some things in our world were created or discovered. Like milk for instance, or honey. Who thought it would be a good idea to stick their hand into the nest of a fast violent creature and eat its shit? It’s precisely this reason that I’m suspicious of heaven.
However the tie has always mystified me most of all. Who decided it would sophiscated and practical to fasten long strands of fabric around the neck? A murderer probably. But I have always been mystified about is how it managed to catch on.
You may say I’m nitpicking, and you’d be right. However I say I’m addressing a valid point, and since I’m writing this, I declare myself right. So here’s what I propose. If something has no seeable purpose it must be removed immediately. That way we’ll have less needless stuff crapping up our already over-complicated lives and most importantly, I wouldn’t have got a B in biology.
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