What's an example of something that usually goes unnoticed when done well but very noticeable when done poorly or not done at all?
Network Administration.
If the network and servers all work: What are we paying you for?
If the network or one of the servers are down: What are we paying you for?
infrastructure in general - even beyond IT. No one sits at home thinking: The sewer system is great! How reliably my shit vanishes from my toilet! Until it doesn't.
I actually do. For some reason my children are fascinated where it all goes, so we’ve seems lots of videos on plumbing, in house and on the street. They’re absolutely bowled over by how it all works and it’s made me appreciate it so much more.
It’s also an enormous hygiene booster; running water, waste management etc. If you have a working water system in your neighbourhood you’re blessed. It’s one of those things Stone Age people would barely believe was real.
Which reminds me of a comment I read on Lemmy not too long ago - someone was wishing for a robot to handle the laundry. And I was like: “What do you think a washing machine is?!”
Water supply is even more important than have a reliable shit hole. Without water our entire existence goes out the window. No flushing toilets, no washing hands, no drinking water, no cooking, no cleaning, and no bathing. I've had power, sewage, and water be unavailable several times. Water is by far the worst. I'd take a week long power outage or a few days without sewage over water being out for a single day.
Here is a recent ticket my team just got. I was honestly suprised how pissy it got.
Hopefully this is the easiest request you've had of the day. This is a request from my C-suite. Since we've looked at the network and everything 'looks good.' But they have asked us to take another look given the continued complaints from the vendor (see attached email) I'm escalating to the NE team so the "experts" can validate that there isn't any code or anything that would be causing this cart to have faulty connections.
I mean, it’s definitely condescending, but it’s also dripping with “I was directly told to do this by someone who has the authority and the attitude to fire my entire department on a whim. I don’t think this will help, but I’m doing this specifically as CYA so I can get back to what I actually need to be doing instead.”
Having recently moved into a house with these issues: doorknobs. You never, ever think about the ones that just work well, but every iffy one is irritating every time you use it.
Door handles>doorknobs
My parents house had a door that sticks. It had been like that for like 15-20 years. I just recently went over to their place for dinner, happened to have my tools in the trunk of my car, and decided to fix it after dinner. It only took like 10 minutes of “pop this hinge off, give it a little bend, and try again” to get it hanging perfectly square. Watching them suddenly have to fight +15 years of “I need to lift this door to close it” muscle memory was funny.
The location of light switches relative to the light.
Ah yes one of the rants from the design of everyday things
Proofreading.
Yuo mean poofrearimg,
And editing. A good editor will have a huge impact on the end result for a book. But the reader never considers that, because they only see the author’s name on the cover.
Bass in music. If the bass play right, you don't hear it, but if they miss or play wrong there is immediately something missing
It took me a while to respect bass guitars but they definitely provide that musical umami
You also need the horn section for that phat sound.
I hear the bass? Or, I guess it depends on what music we're talking about. But in many situations the bass played right is very noticeable. 😁
Sound quality.
I worked in life theater for almost a decade as a sound board op and audio engineer for a few local theaters.
People would always comment to the lighting board op how good the lights were.
But maybe one person in a whole run of a show would compliment the sound.
Boy oh boy, if a cable died mid show... The whole intermission and afterwards I'd have to hear "I do sound at my church and," or some variation of "I'm just a hobbyist but,".
You think I wouldn't pull that cable and replace it if I could???
Yup, came to say the same thing. People only notice good lights and bad audio.
The whole intermission and afterwards I'd have to hear "I do sound at my church and," or some variation of "I'm just a hobbyist but,".
How many audio board ops does it take to change a lightbulb? One to do it, and ten more to comment that they could’ve done it better.
Came to say this.
My work apparently. Other people got promoted for solving problems quickly. I didn't have problems. At least, I did, but I solved them without help or advertising them enough probably.
Anything in IT.
So fucking true
Anyhing IT
Can confirm. The IT guys never deserve their money.
If theyre doing it right, why do we need them? Everything works.
If they do it even slightly wrong, why are we paying them? They clearly can't do anything right.
Garbage trucks / taking the garbage to the right place.
Our streets would be a literal dump if it weren't for waste management
Unfortunately my city has shit waste management so the trash has been piling up for some days now...
IT.
came here to say this and it irks me that doing nothing has the same effect as doing something exceptionally well.
Thought you were talking about the movie, and I agreed.
then realised it was the scary IT you were talking about.
agree even more
User interfaces
And stairs
One more vore for UIs.
Nobody notices great UIs. (Except people who build them - tho if that would be true all uo would be copied and end up great)
Dusting. If you don't dust thoroughly enough things will look alright but people will feel vaguely unwell. Indoor air quality in general is something I notice constantly post-2019
Localization. It's not as easy as simply translating from one language to another!
Done right, you get something of foreign origin that feels like it was done in your backyard.
Done...less than stellar, you get "All your base are belong to us, someone set us up the bomb."
Pic related
Railway safety. On airplanes there will sometimes be people who clap when the plane lands safely. In modern cars we have a number of safety features that are pretty hard to ignore. But with trains everyone is (rightfully) focused on punctuality. Only in the rare event of a crash or similar so most people even begin to think about the safety aspect.
I don't clap when planes land safely, but I'm sure I would celebrate if the train I was on landed safely!
Urban planning. Being able to walk or take transit to all your errands gets taken for granted until you move to a suburban asphalt desert.
Taking a shower.
Housework. Anyhing from putting away coats to doing the dishes, etc
Pretty much all safety regulations
Every safety rule is written in blood but due to no one getting hurt (because of said rules) people begin to think the rules aren't necessary.
It's the same concept with preventative measures like vaccines. Vaccines worked to the point we had an entire generation grow up in a world without the most common forms of debilitating diseases and as a result we now have anti-vaxxers everywhere.
It's even prevalent in things like the hole in the ozone layer. When it was first discovered EVERYONE was panicking about it. But then we fixed it to the point some people think it was never really a problem at all.
This needs more upvotes.
Y2K is another example of this. It could have been bad. But programmers worked for years fixing the date problem in software. Nothing came of it because of all the hard work.
Seasoning
Salt yes, but I'm convinced bay leaves do nothing
A goalkeeper in soccer or similar. It's a thankless job, you save 10 shots, nobody notices. But you miss one and you'll be called a bum by your own fans. As opposed to a forward striker, who might miss 10 shots, nobody notices. But you make one and you'll be a hero being paraded on shoulders.
Funny, I was going to say the referee - a great refereeing performance will rarely be noticeable.
Murder. Just sayin.
Sidewalk construction.
Commercial carpet installation.
Toilet paper.
Walking.
Corporate IT
Bureaucracy.
Plumbing
UX/UI. To be specific input forms. Had to get past a captcha for an appointment. I have no idea how the site handled captchas but couldn't get past it. No indications if it had to be capitalized, with or without spaces etc... Just gave up after trying for a while.
I realize captchas are to prevent bot behavior but I wish there could be some sort of threshold on the backend where if you fail enough times it should recognize that a bot would've moved on by now and only an actual human being would be dumb enough to have persisted that long.
A clean bathroom. Or not...
Door handle design that makes it intuitive whether it requires pushing or pulling to open.
Norman doors! Doors that pull when you think you should push or visa versa
That powdery black finish on computer PSU's.
Sound effects or music on TV and movies. Cleaners. Machine maintenance.
food you order at a restaurant.
Product management.
Wiping ones butt or using bidet after taking a crap.
Bass players until a wrong note is awkwardly placed into the music.
video editing 200%
it is truly an art form
Background music in any environment.
Motorcycle driver
Life.
CGI. When people say "there was too much CGI" they just mean "there was bad CGI" because the good stuff is imperceptible.
And often that's not because the CGI itself is bad quality, but because the effects team was asked to do the impossible with half the tools necessary. The "fix it in post" mentality.
Even small things like having reference lighting examples from the set can be the difference between an okay outcome and something almost imperceptible.
Absolutely. On the Team Deakins podcast they (Roger and his wife James) said they try to be involved in post as much as possible, because when animators and DPs don't communicate, the digital elements are lit differently and end up looking cartoonish.
One time I worked on something where a character threw a spear. For some reason they didn't have a spear on set and asked the actor to just pretend. Then our instructions from the director were to make the actor twirl the spear before he threw it. Just because it looks super cool to twirl stuff, I guess.
Not only did the actor not pretend to twirl it, the shot was about 30 frames long (one second is 24 frames). So we had like 15 frames to make him twirl this giant spear, which the actor didn't do. It was either make it look like dog shit or make a full, hero digital double and completely re-do the shot as 100% CGI, which there wasn't time or budget for.
Yeah, it looked like dog shit. The whole project did.
The reasons why CGI is bad doesn’t matter. If the CGI is bad it is bad.
Like plastic surgery
That's a good one. I like this guy's series on the topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo
I was also going to post the Down The Movie Rabbit Hole series! It’s a very interesting series and well worth watching to understand the “no CGI” claims too.