I think there is something to be said for the role of curiosity in figuring out some of these things as well. My boss jokes that the best strategy when you’re trying to figure something out on an iPad is to hand it to the youngest person in the room, whether that person is 25 or 2. I can’t tell you how many times people have handed me an iPad asking me how to get back to their email inbox after they’ve opened an attachment. They hit the home button and then re-launch the mail app and it brings up the recently opened attachment, rather than the email! They look all around the screen, swipe up and down and scroll left and right and cannot figure out how to return to the inbox. The solution? Tap the screen to bring up the context menus.

A child encounters problems he or she doesn’t know the answer to all the time, and they have to rely on their ability to try strategy after strategy to solve all life’s puzzles. So while I think the iterative nature of how adults learn new skills is extremely reliant on this “presume intelligence,” a child’s case might be a bit different.

I think user interfaces have come a long way, and the fact that you don’t need a plow through a giant manual to access the basic functions of the iPad is definitely a good thing. I think the flaw in Apple’s marketing is trying to bill every feature of the device as “intuitive” — this intuitive quality is only going to make itself apparent if you have an unrelenting, unquenchable curiosity and are constantly trying bizarre solutions to problems you didn’t even know existed — aaaand ta da! A screenshot! Sounds exhausting to me…

The creep is worse than you describe, btw. A number of major chains, including Sears, Kmart, Wal-Mart and Old Navy, will be open during the day on Thanksgiving.

Enough is enough! In this economy, the people who work there can’t decline to work, but the rest of us can vote with our feet, and decline to turn Thanksgiving into just another day of acquisitiveness.