Back in Novem­ber, I got my first water, sewage, and gas bill from a com­pany called ISTA. My apart­ment man­age­ment had taken a while to set up the billing after the pre­vi­ous billing com­pany went of busi­ness (or dropped the con­tract, I don’t remem­ber exactly what hap­pened). So I hadn’t actu­ally paid water and sewage for two or three months.

So when the bill came for $173, I wasn’t too sur­prised. I didn’t really remem­ber what I’d paid the pre­vi­ous year, but this seemed rea­son­able for a few months of water, sewage and gas. I wrote the check, and for­got about ISTA.

Forty five days later, I got the next bill, but this time some­thing seemed wrong: $463 and it had only been a month and a half. What the hell was going on? I looked back on my old bills and noticed that my aver­age 30 day bill was about $30, even in the win­ter. Either the com­pany was try­ing to extort money from me or some­body had made an account­ing error.

I looked more closely at the bill, which had three columns: pre­vi­ous usage, cur­rent usage, and usage. The dif­fer­ence between the first two columns was exactly 1000. The value in the third col­umn was 10,000. Was there some hid­den mul­ti­plier I didn’t under­stand? Maybe there was some rate that just hap­pened to be 10, and I had just kept my apart­ment and show­ers really warm this winter.

So I called ISTA and dis­puted the bill. They imme­di­ately esca­lated it to their dis­pute man­ager, who called me back after a few days. They said that there had been a mis­read meter and that they had cor­rected the read­ing, and that after the bill was now only about $270, after they had applied the credit. When I got the call, I had a meet­ing to be at, so I didn’t think about it much.

After I got home that night, it still didn’t seem right. $270 for 45 days? What hap­pened to the rates? They must have gone up by a fac­tor of 10! So the next day, I called ISTA back, and spoke to a nice lady about my prob­lem. Rather than call the dis­pute man­ager again, she told me she was open­ing my spread­sheet. She pro­ceeded to walk through the cal­cu­la­tions with me, describ­ing the rates and the for­mu­las. I jot­ted them down on paper as we went. Finally, we got to the final total cal­cu­la­tion, and she said, “so this times the mul­ti­plier is … wait, it shouldn’t be.” She imme­di­ately put me on hold.

A few min­utes later, she came back, say­ing that she needed to have the account­ing depart­ment look at my spread­sheet. My spread­sheet, imply­ing that every cus­tomer has their own. She said that the dis­pute man­ager would, yet again, call me back in a few days.

Four days later, the dis­pute man­ager called me back and explained that there was some sort of dis­agree­ment between billing and account­ing, regard­ing the cause of the prob­lem. Billing thought it was the spread­sheet and account­ing thought it was the meter read­ings. She said she’d call back in a few more busi­ness days, after they’d worked out their differences.

When she did call back, she lev­eled with me: account­ing was wrong, there was an error in the spread­sheet, and after fix­ing the mul­ti­plier cell, my bill was reduced by a fac­tor of 10. After the credit cal­cu­la­tors, they deter­mined that I had over­paid from the pre­vi­ous bill by about $100, and that I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have a bill for the next two cycles. She apol­o­gized for how long it took to resolve the issue, but reas­sured me that it wouldn’t hap­pen to me again.

But I wasn’t think­ing about me at this point. I was think­ing about all of the other cus­tomers, whose spread­sheets prob­a­bly had the same error. Would the accoun­tants audit all of the spread­sheets that copied the error? How many cus­tomers would call about the bills? How many would insist, like I did, that there was a spread­sheet error, and demand that it be prop­erly diag­nosed? And how much of this feed­back would ever make it to the accoun­tants writ­ing the buggy spreadsheets?

Oh, end-user pro­gram­ming. Your man­i­fes­ta­tions in soci­ety abound.

Yeah, I’m a lit­tle late to the dis­cus­sion. But as I’ve con­tem­plated over past weeks the mer­its of the iPads form and func­tion, try­ing to imag­ine what I’d do with it and what oth­ers might do with it, I keep com­ing back to the same prob­lem: the iPad, nor the iPod or iPhone, sup­port jux­ta­po­si­tion. That’s what all of this whin­ing about mul­ti­task­ing is about. So many things we do on com­put­ers is com­pare, con­trast, and cross-reference between appli­ca­tions, and yet that’s one of the major things the iPad can­not do.

I wish copy and paste were enough, but it’s not. It’s about writ­ing an email about the news arti­cle you have open, or quickly check­ing the sta­tus on some build, or read­ing a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion online while you’re writ­ing. You can’t do these things on single-task UIs, because the cost of leav­ing one app, open­ing another, and then return­ing to an app is at least 30 sec­onds. That, and every­thing you might want to jux­ta­pose against has to be kept in your head for these 30 sec­onds. Good luck with that when you’re try­ing to think.

So maybe Apple decided the device wasn’t for think­ing or cre­at­ing. Maybe it’s just for con­sum­ing. But even con­sump­tion takes jux­ta­po­si­tion. I find myself on my iPhone all the time, want­ing to read a Yelp review and see where a place is on the map at the same time.  Because this isn’t pos­si­ble, the Yelp app tries to do maps well, and the Maps app will prob­a­bly try to incor­po­rate reviews, lead­ing to sub­stan­dard expe­ri­ences in both apps. Or, another exam­ple was when I was doing my taxes online: I was ref­er­enc­ing advice in forums about teacher deduc­tions (which I found out I can’t take), while try­ing to decide how to answer a Tur­b­o­Tax ques­tion. On the iPad, I’d have to go back and forth between the two, mem­o­riz­ing all the num­bers and excep­tions in the forum post in order to act upon them in the tax software.

Peo­ple are going to real­ize this soon, too, and Apple’s going to suf­fer for it. Either Apple is just wait­ing for the right time to sup­port jux­ta­po­si­tion, or their design­ers just have no idea how peo­ple pro­duce and con­sume information.