After many years of working in user experience, I’ve found the semi-mythical holy grail of poor design: in my grandmother’s condo I encountered the dreaded “which way is which?” thermostat.
Just looking at this picture, you might think that pressing the left-facing button would lower the temperature, and pressing the right-facing button would increase it. And you’d be wrong. At least, I think you’d be wrong.
If only they were reversed, I could at least deal with that….but sadly no, what we have here is *both* a 90-degree control rotation (or negative 90; I’m not sure), and some kind of mode problem where I couldn’t actually just change the temperature on the fly without entering a “temperature change” state.
And no, I never discovered how to enter the “change temp” mode…I just sweltered in the Florida heat for the rest of the visit.

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