Happy Complainer

I’m good at figuring stuff out, but I’m even better at not figuring stuff out. I’d rather not have to figure stuff out if I don’t have to, which is why I like Lufthansa’s calendar widget. You heard right—Lufthansa’s calendar widget—that is the subject of today’s blog post. Why do I like it? Let me count the ways. I like it because when I start to act on my desire to travel backwards in time (which not even the best German airlines can do) and I hover over a date that occurs in the past, the cursor changes from the link-clicking hand to an off-limits symbol. Like so:

On other airlines’ calendar widgets, like United’s, the cursor changes from a link-clicking hand to an arrow. Like so:

This is bad because the arrow cursor can and often does click on things and often after it clicks on things, something happens. But nothing’s going to happen here, and we’re going to have to figure that out for ourselves either by clicking and then noticing that nothing happened (look at all this extra effort—clicking, noticing) or by noticing that the cursor has changed to “something other than the link-clicking hand” and so probably nothing is going to happen if we click. Probably. What I like about Lufthansa’s choice of the off-limits cursor is that there’s no doubt as to what it means. There is no “probably” here, no millisecond of wondering. It doesn’t make you pause to figure anything out by yourself, it just says right away, “Hey buddy, there will be no clicking here.” I’m special, but even I can’t travel backwards in time and Lufthansa makes this immediately obvious to me. For this, I am giving them a gold star. Danke schön, Lufthansa, for removing a millisecond of wondering from my life.

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