Joel Kolstad wrote:

A place I used to work at had a copy machine that displayed the
current time and date on its LCD. It was updated every second, and
for some bizarre reason that update seem to take up about a
quarter-second... during which time key presses (e.g., for setting
the number of copies or paper size or whatever) were ignored! @#$@%#*$
We learned to just hold down each button until it was recognized, but
I could never understand how something with such a poor user
interface was allowed to leave the factory.

Here's one for you. VIP211 HD receiver for Dish Network. All kinds of
nifty features, but also a few horrid issues. Aside from just locking up
and rebooting itself for no apparent reason or upgrading itself with
firmware of the day, it does one really irritating thing.

If you lose reception on a sattellite (3 LNB dish here) and tune to a
channel on that sat, the fun begins. The receiver immediately throws up an
error screen and refuses to pay attention to most button pushes. It will,
however, let you immediately pull up a couple of useless screens, but you
can't change channels. After you give up fighting with it, the process can
procede. It then waits for about 5 seconds for the signal to come back from
that transponder. When it doesn't, the receiver then trys to receive a
signal from every transponder on the sat (usually about 30). It waits for
about 5 seconds on each one. You can't change away, or do anything but
suffer thru this criminal assault on your patience. When it finally figures
out that it can't hear any of the transponders on that sat, it puts up
another error screen and you can then change channels. Hope you don't pick
the wrong one. :-( Oh man, I could just choke the programmer that came up
with that error handling technique.