I love microwave ovens with dials. One dial for the cooking time, and one for the power level.

What more do you need, right? So you can imagine my surprise when I saw exactly how much you could screw up this simple, elegant solution. I spotted this in a gas station in Crescent City, California a couple months ago:

The designers of this microwave really went the extra mile to be helpful. Instead of the usual numbers showing how much time you’re dialing in, which are just so confusing, they used letters! What a novel approach. And they provided a handy heating guide below the dial that maps the letters A through S to different foods you might want to cook. The guide evokes nostalgia, too. It is sure to bring a tear to the eye of anyone who remembers when we all subsisted on hamburgers, microwave popcorn, hots dogs, and pizza, before burritos and sushi ruthlessly invaded the culture of single-handed eating.

But the table is still quite applicable in today’s convenience stores, and the nice thing about this letter dial design is that the convenience store owner could augment the table with her own sign listing additional convenience store foods that were invented after this microwave. You know, “for Hot Pockets, dial F. For Easy Mac, dial H…”

But the bad thing about this dial design is that it sucks. Even in 1981, when some people were surely confused about how long it takes these magical ovens to cook common foods, they did not need letters on the dial. The letters only add myth to the magic. Here we have a new and exciting technology in our culture, and people honestly want to know how it works and how long things take to cook in it. But if all they remember is to dial E for their hamburger, they are not learning anything. This dial encourages a whole new mental model for microwaving that is redundant, confusing, and, worst of all, proprietary.

Now, I will admit this is a very old microwave, made during the “wild west” days of microwave oven dial design, an era when we still hadn’t reached consensus, an era of wild experimentation and lots of illicit drug use. And I am thankful that they used letters and not arbitrary numbers. But I still think they should have known better.

The saving grace is that there are smaller time indicators. You know, for compatibility with other microwaves.

Oh, you might have noticed one other thing. The dial markings are backwards! They go counter-clockwise, so when the microwave is off, you read “S, R, Q, P, O…” from left to right. I struggled with this for a minute, because you do actually turn this dial to the right, just like most other dials. But the difference with this dial is that the letters are actually marked on the dial itself, which is uncommon, and the indicator for which letter you’re on is in the space outside the dial.

Put another way, which of these kitchen timers would you rather use?