Save Knobbery

by The Rev. Katie Phelps

Reverend Phelps is a renegade obstetrician and part-time
architect with buildings in Nunavut, Greenland and Yonkers.
She is an astute profiler of cabbages.

In this world of touch-screens, scroll wheels, buttons, sliders and switches, it’s often possible to think everything is perfect. “What could be missing,” I hear many people ask when examining their state-changing interface options. Some people are so happy with buttons that they do not realize the other common options available. So, what could possibly be missing from this world?

Knobs! I tell you, there was a day when knobs were king. There was a knob for the television, the radio, the gramophone. We had knobs for controlling the thermostat, knobs inside the refrigerator, knobs for our dogs and cats, even knobs in the car, of all places. Take a look around today. Do you see any knobs? No. All around are crude manifestations of state-changing interface systems. Most commonly, one finds buttons. You might think there’s nothing wrong with buttons.

You’d be wrong! Let’s examine the so-called “button.” A button does two things: move up and move down. You’ve got two options with a button, on or off. What good could possibly come from an on/off option? Here’s a button scenario. You go to your television and press the power button. The TV comes on, right? Well, yes, but what if you wanted it to come on at half power? You’re out of luck. That TV’s either on or off. You try making it do something different. You can’t. It’s just got a lowly button.

What about the touch screen? Oh, lookee, a touch screen. I can put my finger here and it does something. That’s not even at the level of a button. Barring not choosing anything, you get one choice: touch. You’re at the airport and you’re going to get your tickets from one of those kiosks with the touch screen. What if you want to order a sandwich? There’s absolutely no way to do it. You’ve just got whatever option is put up there to touch. You can’t even turn the damn thing off without resorting to a, you guessed it, button. That kiosk not only limits your choices to on or off, but also just to touching whatever they throw at you. Try getting a warm pair of socks from a ticket kiosk. I dare you.

Sometimes you might see a switch. It looks different from a button because it sticks out further and moves from one place to another. Wow, fancy. It moves. It’s also a mass-produced hallucination! While you think you’ve got a choice of several states with a switch, you’ve really just got a fancy button with a tail and that leaves you with an on/off choice. Walk into your living room and turn on the light. That’s it. There you go. Now turn it off. At least this time you had something to hold on to while you were getting screwed by the system. Now we get to the tricky part.

Look, my stereo has a set of sliders for the equalizer. Wonder of wonders, I can choose up to seven or more states for that there equalizer. Wake up, you ninny. Take a closer look at this tomfoolery. You know what that slider is? It’s another damn fancy button illusion. I move the bass from 1 to 2. Now I can move it from 2 to 3. See where this is going?

That’s right, a slider is just a dirty trick that moves what amounts to a bunch of buttons in sequence. Try getting that bass to 5.5. You’ll be there for a while. It’s just as much use as trying to get a falafel from an automatic ATM (don’t get me started on those). Trickiest of all is the modern scroll-wheel. You might think it’s like a knob and it works kind of like one, but try grabbing it. Some genius got rid of the wonderful grasping concept of knobs. If you’ve guessed that a scroll-wheel is just a bastardized and useless knob that should’ve been nailed by the heels to some Peloponnesian hill, then you’ve guessed correctly.

Obviously a knob you can’t hold on to is useless. Now you’re probably wondering what’s so great about knobs. Let’s try the previous examples and insert knobs into the situation. Watching TV one night, you realize that the TV is too bright. So you walk up to your television and there is a beautiful, shiny, sensuous knob. You’re eager to touch it and you do. You turn the screen down. It’s now kind of half on and half off. Amazing, no?

What if you were at the airport again? You walk up to the kiosk and instead of that putrid touch screen you have a beautiful pair of knobs just waiting for your patient hand. You dial an airplane ticket and a sandwich. You could even get a warm pair of socks after you’re done. You get home after your trip and walk from the darkened street into your home. You flip the switch, but the light is too bright! You fall to the floor in anguish, but immediately realize that you have a dimmer knob. You reach up and easily turn the light down to a more appropriate and eye-friendly level. Of course, if you were smart, you would have left the dimmer in a friendly position before you left home.

I want to listen to some music, but I want my bass at 5.5 and my treble at 5.1. What do I do? Simple, I’ve got a stereo with knobs and I turn it right there. Tiny Tim in perfect harmony. Who could listen to Tiny Tim with the bass at 5? A mongoloid sub-creature, that’s who. These previous examples completely obviate the need for a scroll-wheel. The scroll-wheel is poorly constructed to be a two dimensional knob. This is the future, man, 3D, virtual reality and whatnot. You don’t need state-changing equipment that requires special glasses! Now that it’s quite obvious that knobs are the superior engineering concept, what can you do to save them? That sound you hear is the sucking of a million knobs into the aether.

The giant industrial consortiums, the media and Congress have all in one way or another conspired to cut the knob from our tools. We must take back our knobs. When you see a forlorn appliance on the street, rescue its knobs. When you’re at the shopping center, pick only knobbed devices. Play with your knobs at all times. Help others to install your spare knobs wherever they might be needed: in the slot on a toaster, by the empty hole in their stereos and even replace old, worn-out knobs. Slip knobbery into casual conversation. Wear pro-knob clothing. Most importantly, don’t give a knob to strangers. You never know what they might do with it. That knob might end up damaged or lost.

Grab that knob and proclaim “this knob is mine!”