…or how to seriously piss off your customers in one easy lesson.

I realise this is a totally left field rant but I am really narked at the company that made my curtain pole. I’ve been out at work all day. It’s been hot. I’ve got hot and bothered. I came home and tried to start to catch up with some of the housework that’s been badly neglected while I’ve been working so hard.

The day before yesterday, the “catching up” consisted of ironing a massive pile of shirts and trousers. Yesterday it was scraping up dog hair and vacuuming the sitting room. All good. Today – changing the sheets – good. Getting down the curtains in the sitting room to wash them. Where the dogs come and go through the door by them, they get caked in mud and muck. So – I got out the ladder, climbed it and thanked the curtain pole designers for the good design of making the fasteners that hold the pole into the brackets open and close with a sweet little flower-shaped screw that you can turn with your fingers. “Excellent” I thought. “What great design” I thought. The pole lifted easily out of the cradles on the brackets. So – all I have to do now is to slide the curtains off the pole. Ha. That’s a laugh. The knobs (see photo) are held on with little screws that use an allen (hex) key to remove the screws. Oh bugger. I am up a ladder, balancing an eight foot long curtain pole, complete with two heavy curtains and unable to get the curtains off the pole. The only thing for it is to put the pole back in its cradle, get off the ladder and go out to the garage in search of allen keys. I searched to no avail. DM appears. I ask him to seek out some allen keys. He finds a box full of them for me and I set off back into the house, up the ladder and try the keys in the screw. Eventually I find one small enough. I’m clumsy. It takes me half-a-dozen trips up and down the ladder to collect the small allen key off the floor, where I have managed to drop it several times. The knob comes off, the curtain slides off and I then start the process all over again at the other end.

So my question is this. Why, oh why design something where one part of it works like clockwork and another is a complete pain in the arse? By the time I’d got the curtains down I was ready to make my curtain pole into just that for the designer who thought that was acceptable design. So, if it was you – be thankful your name was not on the product and be equally thankful that I don’t know where you live!