There is an old joke aphorism that says,"When all else fails, read the instructions."


There is an acronym on the web that says "RTFM" and basically means "take a look at the instructions... moron".

Technical writers and service personnel, them what can read themselves,

or speak coherently,

will tell you that half the problems that clients and customers

encounter would have been a non-proposition if they'd only

opened the pages of the poorly-illustrated and badly printed

little leaflet that came with the hardware or software in question.

A short perusal of that ignominous pamphlet would have informed

the user that they had no friends on the manufacturing side of

the equation and they would have begun their journey into the

fun world of computing or lawn-mowing or what-have-you, functioning

at a level of ignorance equal with the folks who made the steaming

pile of fetid ICs.

Although the literature is presented in a more brightly colorful format,

with clean-scrubbed, well-dressed, smiling people caressing a
product that vaguely resembles the one you thought you bought,

with clearly printed on good stock paragraphs describing how their dog was cured of his overbite and their cat of ovarian cancer

by the forthright fortitude and genius of the company and staff

that designed and built the marvelous machine,

under no circumstances are you to consult the marketing information with any serious intent at increasing your knowledge of the actual capabilities of the product.

The sales brochure tells you what the machine is supposed to do, what the lower management hope

it will do, and what the tech mavens think it quite possibly might do in version 5.0...

while what you have sitting in front of you, emitting first hand

smoke, is the commercial version of the beta...

which means that your manuel is a bit of marketing fluff, too,

those chapters that aren't left over from the previous machine generation, whose OS registry is still needed on the drive in order to load the new code.

That old OS may be what is actually kludging your machine in the
first place...

in which case, I think you can safely delete it from your DOS.

If that causes any problems, you can go to the public library and

consult the online manuel, which is updated every time a new

summer intern comes into the company with some rudimentary
typing skills and a sincere fear of spell-checkers,
at least in his native language.


But be that as this all may be, it never hurts to have the

instructions sitting safely by for every mechanism and gadget

that you buy in the house. I strongly suggest that you staple or

insert into the instructions the receipt for said object.

Comes in handy during class-action law suits.

It also allows you, if you store such documents in a fireproof

box, to try to allow the firemen to pinpoint which obnoxious

electrical object of your's helped burn down the entire

block of flats one evening while you were off cavorting at

a Star Trek: V-ger convention, hoping to get Jeri Ryan to let

her picture be taken next to you while you clutch your seven of

nine plushy...

Yuck. You're strange.