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.