The Escape Boy

I attended an interesting lecture last night, given by a professor in literature. She was using Powerpoint to project a few pictures. She hit against a key while shuffling papers, and the menu showed up with "Help/Next/Previous/GoTo". She interrupted what she was reading to panic.

"Oh, dear. What do I do now?"

Since I had been late coming and was standing in the back, I didn't want to call attention to myself by just saying "click again!". No one in the audience dared (or knew?) what to do.

Luckily, there was a technician manning the microphone from a booth at the back, he walked down with a sigh to click for her.

Why do people use tools that scare them? Why do we build tools that are so incomprehensible to use?