To Choose, or not to choose

There was an advert recently discussing the unfairness of "Or" as opposed to "And". One means you have to choose, the other means you get both. I think Honda ran the advert. You have to admire their brass face, I don't think a major automotive manufacturer has ever built a slower F1 car with such an enormous budget. "We can go fast, or we can go slow". I forgot, they're selling the "And" clause over the "Or", aren't they? "We can go slow, and we can go slow".

Is having a choice always the best thing since sliced bread? Did we need Betamax and VHS? Since you couldn't use both at the same time, it was really a choice of one or the other.

But business seems to love the "And". Why? Let's take screws, for instance. Old-fashioned slot-head screws can be a real pain to use, because you have to keep centralising the screwdriver in the screw or it will slip out and gash something, usually a hand. So someone had the bright idea of making a screw with a pair of slots in the head, and a special bit to fit those slots, a cross-head bit, so that it centred in the screw and just stayed put.

And then someone else had the next bright idea. Let's make two competing types of cross-head screws, one called Phillips and the other called Posidrive. And let's make them subtly different, so that instead of having to have three of four different sizes of screwdriver to fit the different screw sizes, you need to have double that amount to cater for both Phillips and Posidrive screws.

"And," (there's that sodding word again), where they got really clever was, "let's make then almost visually indistinguishable from each other." So you can't say to yourself, "I'll have nothing more to do with that Phillips, (or Posidrive)", weed out half of the screwdrivers from your toolbox, and just concentrate on the job of getting the shelves up. "Or" is not an option. You can't get one type of screwdriver that will reliably work on both types of screw.

At least Betamax and VHS had the common sense to be different enough so that you couldn't get confused between them.

In an extreme moment, I admit I have just put in a couple of cross-head screws with a hammer. After finding that the wrong type of screwdriver had chewed up the cross to the point where the screw could be neither tightened nor removed by either type of screwdriver, what choice was there left?

It was fun doing it. I don't have a sign up when I'm working saying "Caution, men working", I have one which reads "This is a designated foul-language area."