Recently I bought a pair of convertible cargo pants—you know, with legs that zip off to convert your pants into shorts. The detached legs are not quite identical, so the manufacturer provided L and R tags. Simple enough. What could go wrong?

Well, the manufacturer—Columbia—attached the L and R tags not to the legs, but to the shorts.

The left leg is marked “L”. I knew that.

You would think that at some point during the design and manufacture of these pants, someone at Columbia would have said, “You know, it’s hard to tell the detached left leg from the right, but anyone can look at a pair of shorts and tell which is left and which is right. The L and R tags ought to be on the legs, not on the shorts.”

Evidently, that never happened.

Before you suppose that the sewing factory simply put the labels in the wrong place, let me point out that the labels are designed to attach to the zipper pulls, and the zippers are most definitely designed to remain with the shorts.

That is a UX failure of the grossest kind. But does it deserve to be called stupid?

(When I was a lawyer, UX was an abbreviation for uxor, Latin for wife. Now it means User Experience. Feel free to make a joke out of that.)

Shortly after I bought the cargo pants, I replaced the entry locksets in our home. Our Kwikset units were ten years old and had corroded so badly you could barely get a key in the lock. I upgraded to Schlage locksets.

The function of a lockset, by the way, is to lock intruders out. Not to lock yourself out.

With these new Schlage locksets, you twist a little button to lock the door from the inside. If you then turn the handle to go outside, the button remains in locked position. So if you step outside to retrieve the morning paper, and the door shuts behind you, you are locked out. Every other lockset I’ve worked with unlocks the door when you open it from the inside.

The door is locked.

The door is still locked.

After spending 45 minutes locked in my garage, I decided to trash the Schlage devices and replace everything again.

Schlage locksets. UX failure? Definitely. Stupid? Possibly.

There is a bar down the street named O’Neill’s. As we all learned in school, those ’ marks are apostrophes. They curl to the left. The big illuminated sign for the bar says O‘Neill’s.

Well, at least they got the second one right.

Stupid? Quite likely. Illiterate for sure.

Our old clothes dryer had a buzzer that sounded when the dryer stopped. It was convenient and it worked. Our new Amana clothes dryer starts beeping long before the drying is over. It beeps and it beeps and it beeps. When the beeping stops, that’s your signal that the dryer has stopped. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.

UX failure? Absolutely. Stupid? It damn well is.

But what has this got to do with software?

I posit this axiom: the bigger the company, the more vulnerable it is to stupid mistakes.

The failures I’ve mentioned are not the result of misjudgment by a single person. Columbia is a big company, as are Schlage and Amana. The bar is small time, but two businesses—the bar and the sign company— jointly committed the error. In pari stupido, as it were. There’s a huge difference between the mistake of a single person and the systemic ineptitude of an entire organization.

Stupid derives from Latin stupere, to stun. If you’re a big company, UX failures like those mentioned here can result only from mass cerebral paralysis. Reviewers and managers sitting stunned in their chairs, unable to act beyond a weak and fearful hand wave of approval. That’s what I call stupid.

Well, to be fair, maybe the QA chap was out sick that day, or thought the project was assigned to someone else. Still, big software companies command vast opportunities for error correction. Yet their slop and sludge is far more evident than the slipups of the small software shop, where like as not somebody edited that .xib at three o’clock in the morning. The quality and attention to detail in indie software never fails to amaze me, while—well, I really don’t expect quality from some companies any more.

Anyone can make a simple mistake. When those with responsibility fail to catch it, that’s a stupid mistake.

I happily assert that none of my software contains stupid mistakes.