The Turning Of A Page

You ever get something that is somewhat mundane in nature, and yet for reasons unexplained, the creators of said object have placed an inordinate amount of work into some feature that provides no real value or functionality? When you look at most things, everything serves some kind of purpose, even colors which provide some aesthetic value. Most of the time, companies won't waste their time in tossing in stuff that is completely pointless.

Today, I saw an email that contained a link to our annual benefits novel, which was provided as an online doc rather than cutting down a forest to send it to everyone (which I'm sure they've done anyway). It opened up in this e-reader, similar to what I've seen used by store ads online. I'm sure you've seen these before. You hover your mouse in the lower corner of the "page", the page reacts and you can drag it over like you're turning a real page (you know, instead of clicking the little right arrow at the bottom of the screen like a sane user).

I caught the sound out of the tinny speaker in the CPU (since I really don't care about sound on my work computer; that's what headphones are for). Yeah, in this benefits document that 90% of the users will read at work, they bothered to take the extra time and expense to include a page turning sound. I can't even imagine how many man-hours went into this extremely minor and utterly pointless detail. I suppose that's my insurance premiums at work.

Every since then, I've been looking for something to compare how absolutely pointless that sound is, and I got nothing. There is literally nothing I can think of off the top of my head that would hold less consumer value than the sound of a turning page in an online benefits manual. There's a new simile for you.

That's as useless as the sound of a turning page in an ebook. And yet, that page turn sound will still be more pointless than whatever you compared it to.