My mother tells a story from back before I was even born.
At the time my dad was a lowly rank in the RAF. In those days it was frowned upon for the wives of higher ranks to associate the wives of lower ranks (some kind of 'class' thing, I suppose). Anyway, for some reason mum passed on a good sewing machine to the wife of a high-ranking officer. After a week the lady complained that the machine was faulty, making insinuations about the lower-rank riff-raff cheating her.
So mum went over to the officer's house, and checked out the machine. The first thing she did was check the threading.
It turned out that the officer's wife had previously had a machine where the needle threaded from the side. The 'new' machine threaded the needle from the front. So the wife had removed the needle from its housing, rotated it 90 degrees and reinserted it with the hole on the side. So of course it wasn't going to work!
I suspect that my mum gloated about the idiocy of officers wives for quite some time, considering she still remembers the story 50+ years later.....
K