Thanks to a piece in “The Atlantic,” I’ve now heard of UX. If that isn’t pronounced “ucks,” it should be. In fact, it is short for user-experience in the Silicon Valley argot we now have to use in place of english. This is another user-experience many of us could do without. We’ve gotten used to english.

UX represents the revolutionary idea that things designed by techie types may not take into account the needs, abilities, and patience of casual users, also known as customers. The Silicon Valley cognoscenti may know how to use the products they create, but a larger audience is often all at sea.

The usual solution, furnishing incomprehensible answers to FAQs is not the solution, especially for people who have to look up the meaning of FAQs. According to “The Atlantic” report, as long ago as 1993 the then-head of Apple was told the company needed someone whose job was to worry about what it was like to use their machines

Allegedly, light has finally dawned. “LinkedIn lists tens of thousands of UX job openings,” and you can study the emerging discipline at three dozen universities to become “user-experience architects” practicing “design thinking.”

Swell. When do we see the fruits of their labors? From where I sit, the products I’m expected to buy to serve my needs are less likely to be my friend and helper than to resemble malign prankster gods, balky toddlers, or confused Alzheimers patient prone to walking off and getting into trouble.

Alexa regularly pipes up unbidden to answer questions she has not been asked, which is almost as creepy as the fact they she is spying on everything said in my home. If divorce lawyers ever gain access to the Alexa archives, we are all toast.

My “Smart” TV remote has so few buttons that there seems to be no way to fast forward or rewind, though there surely is some code the average user is unable to break. I’ve looked it up repeatedly on line, but have never been able to make it perform.

Conversely, the cable remote requires me to push buttons four times in order to tell the machine to record a show. Couldn’t the UX chaps achieve “record” with a single push of a single button? Similarly, to change settings on my jazzy, up-to-date thermostat requires me to poke its touchscreen eighteen times! Really, I counted. Will the UX folks pay for the surgery to repair my eroded thumb joints?

And speaking of temperature, when we go from summer to winter a light on my dashboard tells me my tires are under- or overinflated, but when I adjust the air pressure there’s no way to turn off the nagging harridan on my dash without visiting the dealer. This is presumably a designed-in user-experience meant to ruin my day but boost dealer revenue. Thanks UX. We may be technically illiterate, but we aren’t stupid.

We have all learned to dread automatic updates of software which are undoubtedly required to keep UX gurus busy or to fix the bugs they built-in the last time. But the inevitable result is to change how operations work that have become second nature. So, you now have to re-learn how to use your device. What if I like spellcheck just the way it was? Leave me alone UXers. It is as if your car automatically updated itself, so suddenly the steering wheel is on the other side of the car or the gas and brake pedals have changed places.

And how do you learn how your gizmo works these days? There used to be handy guidebooks, shop manuals, user instructions. Admittedly, they were often written as incomprehensibly as Ikea assembly instructions, but at least they existed. Now paper is apparently passe and reading frowned upon.

instead, when we buy a new car we are advised to login to a website and watch a video, but first you have to figure out where online to go, ask the question in a way the semi-literate robo-assisitant understands, and hope it speaks your language — what Marianne Moore called in “plain American which cats and dogs can read.”

But what if you aren’t connected when you need an assist? Has a UX genius ever found himself in a car that has died by the side of the road. Since the car has no hard copy manual in the glove compartment, the recourse is to login from your dashboard and laboriously type in your question to the UX deity in the cloud.

But what if your problem has occurred in a landscape familiar from “Deliverance?” No power from the car, no GPS, no bars, no signal, no help on the way. You have been UXed — User exterminated.

Here is my simple solution to the user-experience problem. Hire a bunch of users who have no advanced degrees in tech, design, ergonomics, or robotics and let them tell you what’s wrong with your incomprehensible, annoying product. Then, fix it so they like it as much as you do.