The button nobody showed me

It was summer in Southwest Michigan, probably 2012. My brother and I came out of a Lowe’s into one of those huge parking lots, and of course we had to walk all the way across it to my car.

It must have been hot, because somewhere on that walk I said something like, “I wish this thing had remote start.” I can’t promise I remember the humidity, but I lived there long enough to bet on it, and that much heat with that much humidity will make anyone sweat. I sweat easily, and a lot, so I’m sure I was.

If you’ve ever opened a car that’s been sitting in a summer parking lot, you know it’s an oven in there.

The car was a 2006 Mazda 6, the Grand Touring with the V6. I’d bought it from my brother a couple of years before. It was a great car, and the Bose sound quality was excellent. But 2006 was probably one of the worst model years there was, across every manufacturer, for one reason: the smartphone was about to change how people think about music and technology, and how all of it connects to your car. No aux jack. No Bluetooth. That lovely Bose system ran on a six-disc CD changer, right when the people around me were starting to plug in their phones. I had a modern-ish car, aggressively dated in the worst way by technology that moved faster than it did.

So I knew exactly what my car couldn’t do. I could have given you that list in my sleep.

What I didn’t know was what it could do.

My brother did, because it used to be his car. It didn’t have remote start. But it did have a way to cool the car off a bit before you got to it. Then he showed me: hold down the unlock button on the key fob, and the windows roll down by themselves.

It wasn’t what I wished for. It was something that made my life better, and I already owned it. Two summers of opening the door into an oven, and the fix had been in my pocket the whole time.

It wasn’t the first time a car got the better of me, either. My first car was built in 1990. When I got out, I’d hit the power lock button, and every door would lock except mine. The driver’s lock would go down and pop right back up. I thought it was broken. Eventually someone explained it to me. The car was protecting me from locking my keys inside. If I held the inside door handle open while I hit the lock, the car took that as proof I meant it, and it locked every door.

That wasn’t a defect. It was somebody’s careful engineering doing exactly its job, and I spent who knows how long thinking it was broken.

Cars and software have a lot in common. You can see a lot, and they’re made to look nice. But what actually makes them go is everything you can’t see. Cars today have touchscreens and voice commands, so maybe this story dates me. Back then you had a thousand buttons, and it never crossed your mind that one of them might do two different things depending on how you pressed it. But that’s how engineering has always worked. The clever stuff gets built in quietly, and then it sits there waiting for somebody to find it.

It’s funny how often nobody does. That Mazda’s owner’s manual runs 354 pages, and somewhere in there it says it plain as day: “Press the unlock button on the transmitter and hold it.” I never read it. I don’t know many people who’ve read theirs.

The same thing happens with the tools we use at work. I didn’t have the feature I wanted. But I had something that served the purpose I wanted, and the only thing hiding it was what I didn’t know. Software is full of that. You go looking for the feature you have in mind, it isn’t there, and you figure you’re stuck, when something you already have would do the job if you knew how to use it. Most of the time, there’s nobody standing right next to you with the exact solution to your complaint while you’re filing it.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when you’re busy driving. You learn enough to get where you’re going, and then you go. The way you’ve always done it works, so you keep doing it, right up until somebody shows you a better way and you see how you could have elevated your experience all along.

It might be a feature in software you already pay for. It might be a report somebody builds by hand every Friday. It might be a tool your whole team works around because nobody was ever shown what it can do.

So here’s my question: What’s your button?

If you can’t find it, that’s where we come in. Reading the manual is our job, so we can point you to what you’re already paying for and help you get the most out of it, or tell you when it’s time to switch to something that fits you better.

Sources

• Mazda 6 2006 Owner’s Manual (ManualsLib): 354 pages, with a section titled “Opening/Closing The Power Windows From Outside,” checked October 31, 2026.
• 2006 Mazda6 Owner’s Manual, page 3-29 (ManualOwl): “Press the unlock button on the transmitter and hold it. After the doors and the hatch/liftgate are unlocked, the windows fully open automatically,” checked October 31, 2026.