Threat Level: Ambiguous
On the wait to board our airplane in Detroit before flying back to California last month, I overhead an announcement in the terminal:
"The threat level according to [some organization] is: Orange."
I turned to the nearest baggage handler standing by me and asked him what "Threat level: Orange" meant. Trying to avoid eye contact with me, he said that he didn't know and that I would have to talk to someone in TSA to find out.
So, question: how in the hell is anyone supposed to know what "Threat level: Orange" means? A color is not quantifiable in the human mind. "Orange" doesn't even afford a person a sense of where it lies in relation to other colors. Does it use the colors of a rainbow as its range? If so, what's at the top, Red or Violet? It's not even safe to assume that a rainbow is being used here. Maybe they correspond to those delightful Teletubbies, and the orange one was the least threatening.
And no, I'm not going to Google it. Fuck that. If the organizational body (in this case, I presume it's the TSA) that decided upon using colors as a means of setting threat levels wanted to help me as a person, they've failed miserably. You can't expect people to look that kind of information up, since most people don't travel a lot. And even if you do look it up, "Orange" is still unintuitive enough to be useless. There's no mnemonic there.
Let's say you've got five levels you need to specify. Here's what you use: "Safe", "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Everyone's Fucked". Very clear, self-explanatory phrases with semantic meaning for the average human brain.
The engineers that created this system, like so many others, ignored human frailty. Because of this, they've failed to create something useful. (although I might be wrong in assuming that "useful" was the end goal here)
"The threat level according to [some organization] is: Orange."
I turned to the nearest baggage handler standing by me and asked him what "Threat level: Orange" meant. Trying to avoid eye contact with me, he said that he didn't know and that I would have to talk to someone in TSA to find out.
So, question: how in the hell is anyone supposed to know what "Threat level: Orange" means? A color is not quantifiable in the human mind. "Orange" doesn't even afford a person a sense of where it lies in relation to other colors. Does it use the colors of a rainbow as its range? If so, what's at the top, Red or Violet? It's not even safe to assume that a rainbow is being used here. Maybe they correspond to those delightful Teletubbies, and the orange one was the least threatening.
And no, I'm not going to Google it. Fuck that. If the organizational body (in this case, I presume it's the TSA) that decided upon using colors as a means of setting threat levels wanted to help me as a person, they've failed miserably. You can't expect people to look that kind of information up, since most people don't travel a lot. And even if you do look it up, "Orange" is still unintuitive enough to be useless. There's no mnemonic there.
Let's say you've got five levels you need to specify. Here's what you use: "Safe", "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Everyone's Fucked". Very clear, self-explanatory phrases with semantic meaning for the average human brain.
The engineers that created this system, like so many others, ignored human frailty. Because of this, they've failed to create something useful. (although I might be wrong in assuming that "useful" was the end goal here)