For those of you who ever used Microsoft Office in the 1990′s, you may remember the Microsoft Word Assistant, “Clippy”.  Clippy would pop up while you would write.

“I see you are writing a letter.  Would you like me to format it for you?” the animated office supply would offer.

If you agreed to the offer, Word would proceed to rearrange your work in seemingly random fashion.  If you declined help, it would do nothing but wait…until it could “help” you again.  Either way, though, you had to stop what you were doing to deal with the your “assistant”.

Now that I think about it, it is much like writing with the beast in my lap.  Very helpful indeed.

Shortly after our office computer systems were upgraded to this then-new version of Word years ago, frustration quickly reached fever pitch.  Sitting quietly in my office I could frequently here a colleague cursing at his desk.

“GO AWAY!!!  I don’t need any $%^&*# help!!”, I would hear.  Knowing full well he was alone in his office, I knew it was Clippy he was berating.

Around this time, someone sent me a parody of Clippy.

“I see you are writing something important.  Shall I f#$% it up for you?”, the modified Clippy offered.

We weren’t alone in our frustration.

In 1999, Bill Gates famously wrote a company memo simply entitled Clippy Must Die.  NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, on the news of Mr. Gates departure from Microsoft, resurrected the memo  in one of its segments, which you can listen to in the clip below.

Clippy has indeed been killed off by Microsoft, but it seems there is a never-ending stream of annoying “features” to take its place.  Word would still reformat things for you.  I still have no idea how to anchor a picture, graph or table in the exact spot that I would like it to be.  Just two days ago, I spent 45 minutes undoing the damage adding a single table did to a 22 page document.  Pressed for time I sent the table I wished to add as a separate document.

Yes, Microsoft has some doozies, but they are not alone.  My new phone requires 4 different button pushes to be ignored.  My “new” car came with a tire pressure monitoring system that failed to monitor the tires but instead went off at random.  The sunroof does not open when it is sunny.

For the single most annoying feature ever invented, though, I have to tip my hat to Toshiba.

My Toshiba laptop has a touchpad.  I much prefer a mouse, but for as many times as I drag my laptop around the house, I’d really rather not have to add another accessory to the pile of stuff that I am carrying.  After this week though I may, for my own sanity and to ensure the aforementioned laptop does nor morph into a high-speed projectile, have to invest.

You see the Toshiba Touchpad has a scroll feature; like the little roller on a two button mouse.  Unlike the roller on a mouse, though, the feature is activated by using a portion of the touchpad.  I have no idea where the precise boundaries of the scroll part of the pad is, though, and to be frank it doesn’t always work.  For example, I just tried to scroll to the top of this post….nothing.

If, on the other hand, you would simply like to move the cursor up or over a bit to highlight something useful, the touchpad frequently interprets that as a need to scroll.  Instead of highlighting an important section, you are instead zipping off to an entirely different part of the file.  On a 22 page document this is annoying.  On a 90,000 line spreadsheet this is seizure inducing.

So for their efforts, Toshiba takes the prize for allowing me the privilege of paying extra for a feature that makes me absolutely stark-raving mad….and not just a little angry, too.