Never count on a spell check to alert you that you spelled a word correctly in the wrong context!

The TED community has chosen Partners in Health, an organization that has operated medical facilities in Haiti for more than 2 decades and have numerous people on the ground. Among other activities, PIH has helped coordinate efforts to bring the largest hospital in Haiti back into a functional facility.

You can make a donation here, and rest assured that your money is going where it can do the most.

To donate by mail, send a check made out to Partners In Health to:

Partners In Health | P.O. Box 845578 | Boston, MA 02284-5578

Photo: Dr. Evan Lyon has been a volunteer physician with Partners in Health for over a decade,
and participated in PIH's initial response to the earthquake on January 12, 2010.

Perhaps this has happened to you. I went to the store and got a package of X. When back at home I wanted to use the X. The packaging was beautiful. Obviously someone had spent some time on the design of every aspect, especially the self-promoting advertising that covered the whole package. My puzzle was about how to get the X out of the beautiful package. Upon careful examination I found (in 8 point type, 25% gray printing over top of a giant image of a happy, beautiful person enjoying X) the word “Open” and a little tab of packaging. I puled the tab. It came off in my hand without altering the beautiful package in any other way.

So I attacked the beautiful package with a knife, making it impossible to reseal. I put the whole beautiful mess in a zip lock bag after extracting my portion of X.

I thought this may be a case of function being subverted by form. Not really. The package is a billboard designed to make you buy X. That is it’s function. Once bought, the job is done and you’re on your own.

OK, so the purveyors of X are capitalists and selling X is their goal. That’s all fine.

I will even go so far as to say that I got a tiny bit of enjoyment from the game of finding the “Open”. Then it all went badly. Don’t tease me like that, it infuriates!

Why can’t they get it right? Just make it obvious and easy to enjoy a fresh portion of X.

“Open” sets an expectation in my mind that isn’t fulfilled. Worse, I feel cheated, double crossed when it goes wrong. My experience of X becomes negative before even getting to the main attraction.

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Jeff Howell has thirty years experience in computer industry, spanning hardware, manufacturing, QA and software in engineering, management and consulting.