richter

I spent the last 20 minutes of my workday last night trying to figure out why my (Windows) display suddenly flipped upside-down. I opened Outlook, clicked New, and next thing I knew productivity went out the window. First I opened up my monitor’s settings to see if something had glitched out in the hardware, but there was no option to rotate the view. Next I went into Display Properties, and same deal. No options? How did this even happen?

So naturally, I asked Mr. Interwebz what was up. I searched for windows xp monitor flip, which is probably a pretty bad term based on my issue (I’ve always sucked at searching… it’s a handicap). I have to admit — the Yahoo! Search results were pretty bad. The first link was to some random blog about displays, and the second was to a Windows Vista blog (actually windowsvistablog.com, how’s that for a lark?)

Now, I relatively recently switched over from Google Search to Yahoo! Search, and not because I felt like I had to, but because I genuinely like it more (it’s debatable whether this is just an extension of happiness for my new job though — a very credible argument). But I still occasionally check Google just to see how Yahoo!’s doing. And in this case it wasn’t good. I thought my term was bad, but it wasn’t. The first Google result was exactly what I was looking for.

But I digress. We’re talking about my display rotating 180° and disabling my ability to send out an email. What the hell caused this? Apparently I had hit the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+Down. Try it now: it’s unfuckingbelievable (use Ctrl+Alt+Up to fix). So I want to go through the several layers of usability atrociousness this represents:

1. First off, what the hell just happened? When you change just the damn screen resolution it gives you that notice that if it looks bad it’ll automatically revert to your old settings. Throw us a bone, huh? We can’t even read upside-down, much less troubleshoot.
2. Seriously? Ctrl+Alt+Down?? That’s a pretty simple typo to get some nasty results. I’ve seen shortcuts I use 100x more often that are comprised of twice as many keystrokes. Nuts.
3. Why the dicks is this not in Display Properties? For the longest time I honestly thought this was just a feature Windows XP didn’t have (I even thought OSX was pretty cool for having it when Windows didn’t).
4. Lastly (and probably most importantly), why the hell is this even a keyboard shortcut? They should be reserved for commands that users perform on a constant basis. Really, GUIs are pretty intuitive and it’s not hard to do most things via point-and-click, so shortcuts just make things quicker and easier. Want to save your file? Ctrl+S. Want to open a new window? Ctrl+N How goddamn often do you need to rotate your entire display? Not exactly something you need to do rapid-fire.

(Disclaimer: as usual I may be wrong about something, for example the option might be somewhere hidden in Display Properties. But my point is that it wasn’t easy to find. I’m not always an idiot, but it was easy to destroy my display for a chunk of an hour.)