Button Creep

We used to describe our technological age as a “push-button” culture. Today, that would be a vast understatement. Take a guess at how many buttons you need to push every day just to get through the day! 

In millions of homes across America right now, probably including your own, there are DVD players, VCRs, DVRs, entertainment systems and other electronic devices with the time of day continually flashing “12:00 a.m.”

Why?

Blame it on button creep.

A few decades back, when TVs and other electronic gadgets started arriving with remote controls, the buttons were few and controlled only a small number of functions. They weren’t too complicated to use. But with each new generation of consumer electronic devices the number of buttons has crept upward. And the increasing number of buttons has made such things as setting the time of day too complicated.

When you first brought these units home from the store, you may have taken the time to wade through the complex and lengthy step-by-step instructions to program the time (and, of course, each unit had a different procedure to accomplish that), but then your neighborhood had one of its occasional power failures. When the...