Unnecessary Limits
It’s been two weeks since my last posting. It’s been a busy two weeks too. I spent last week visiting my parents in Minnesota. Guess what souvenir I brought back from Minnesota? A big, fat head cold. I felt a minor sore throat coming on last Thursday, but that was it and I thought I was going to be lucky. Sunday, it blossomed into a full-blown head cold and yesterday I woke up with a slight fever. Today, I feel stronger and the symptoms seems to be less severe, so I think I’m past the worst of it.
My normal routine in the morning includes taking a blood glucose reading followed shortly by breakfast. When I take that blood glucose reading, I mark (“tag” in the terminology of the glucose meter feature of the Personal Diabetes Manager device that I use to control the activities of my insulin pump) the reading as “Fasting” and “Pre-meal.” This morning, however, with my cold, I decided I needed an additional marker: “Sick day.”
Except it wouldn’t let me do it. I had already set the “Fasting” and “Pre-meal” tags and it wouldn’t let me do a third one. If I cleared “Fasting” or “Pre-meal”, it would then let me set the “Sick day” tag. So, I guess the manufacturer decided for me that I would never need more than two tags. They were almost right because it has taken me two years to notice this limitation. But, in the business of user interfaces, making decisions for the user that are “almost right” is wrong.
On a related subject, when I enter a glucose reading manually, I can’t add tags to the reading at all. I prefer my Breeze2 and Contour meters by Bayer Healthcare so I often enter readings manually and all those readings are tag-free. It’s not that tag-free readings are a big problem for me; the real problem is it seems like an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation.
