You might have heard that sometimes last week one of the rooftops in Toronto was on fire, with thick black smoke covering up the area. That was exciting! Gave people something to talk about for a whole five minutes. Anyways, the news didn’t quite say what happened, but nobody really cared anyways. Today though I was doing some BBQing on the roof of our building, and here’s what I discovered – setting a roof on fire is easier than you would hope!

The picture below is of the knob on our BBQ. Why do I care? Well, because when I came to make my steak, I found the grill emitting quite a strong scent of gas. Both knobs were open, since 1pm yesterday! [I know because I checked the security log] Naturally I asked myself why the BBQ was on, and as you will see from this picture, the answer isn’t all that obvious.

As you see, the grill has a scale from low gas (270 degrees) to full gas (180 degrees). To actually turn the damn thing off, I had to click on the knob and then turn it further into the 90 degree position. There is no indication this is an off position! Instead, at 270+a little, there is some black and white rectangle that’s supposed to mean something. I still can’t figure out what it is or why it’s there, since the knob doesn’t actually go into that position, but somebody thought it was a nice image, i guess.

The bottom line, whoever used the grill yesterday, did what any normal person would do with this knob – turn it down to the low gas, see the flames disappear, and assume that the BBQ was shut off. I wish I could find the engineer who made this design and tell him/her all I think.

Most engineers would say Human Factors is common sense, which it is, but unfortunately it seems that nobody has common sense anymore. Agr!