Before you read this, I need you to know that I understand how absurdly petty and stupid this all is. I get it. This post I’m about to write here is not the work of a healthy, well-adjusted human, and I get that, but at the same time, I felt compelled to write it. It’s not even topical! It’s about a post I wrote way back in December, months and months and months ago, about the last car you can still buy new without an LCD screen, the GMC Savana/Chevy Express. It’s not even so much about the post, but about comments made on the Instagram post that went along with it, and, perhaps most significantly, this is about the all-consuming terror that is Someone Being Wrong on the Internet.
Now I want to be clear, I firmly believe that I did not start this petty war, but I did allow myself to get sucked into it (38 weeks later), and I do believe I will fucking end it. It’s directly about the display on the infotainment system of the GMC Savana/Chevy Express van, and whether or not it is, in fact, an LCD display. In my article, I specifically noted that it is not – in fact, that is the whole point of the article, that this is the very last new car you can buy without an LCD display on the dash. There is a monochrome display there, but it’s an old school vacuum fluorescent display (VFD).
Anyway, like many articles, we had an associated Instagram post about it:
Now, what I want to point out is that in the comments on this post, there were a surprising amount of people who insisted that the whole article was wrong, because the display shown was, in fact, an LCD display. These people seemed to delight in what they felt was an awesome gotcha:
Now, you’ll notice that at the time, 38 freaking weeks ago, I did try to reply that it was, in fact, a VFD screen. Then, I’ll be honest, I forgot about all of this until yesterday when I happened to be looking for something else in my Instagram feed and found this. And then I read the comments again, and found that my irk gland was secreting a lot of irkatosin, which made me irked.
Who are these people that have such blind, unthinking confidence that they feel the need to correct something without even trying to confirm that that something even needs correcting? Look at fucking Patrick there, the only one who felt so confident he needed to respond on two separate threads, once stating “it literally is not” and then again claiming “there’s no way,” suggesting that these monochrome VFDs cost as much as an LCD.
Oh, Patrick. I’m sure you’re a great guy, but if I may offer some humble advice: before you go making wildly confident statements like this, in this sort of dickhead manner, maybe just take a moment to consider that maybe – just maybe – the person who wrote the article actually did the minimum of research.
I don’t expect any of these VFD denialists to believe me, so today I fucking contacted fucking GM itself and just asked outright. Here was the response from GM’s Global Tech and Innovation Comms representative:
Hey Jason,Hope you’re doing well. You are correct that it’s a Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD).Have a great weekend!Kellie
Did you see that, Patrick and all of you other overconfident display-identifiers? It’s literally a VF fucking D.
It’s been a long week.
The post This May Be The Pettiest Post I’ve Ever Written About An Infotainment Display appeared first on The Autopian.
