“To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor.
If the cabin should enter more persons,
each one should press a number of wishing floor.
Driving is going alphabetically by national order.”
- Actual sign in a Belgrade hotel elevator
Every so often my old digital watch sets itself.
The alarm goes off at 2 a.m. This happens about once a month despite the fact that I did not set it. I know this is the case because I have no idea how to set the alarm even if I wanted to.
After months of being stymied, I sat down with the instructions and deconstructed them like a Talmudist, finally figuring out what was happening. To set the alarm on the watch, three buttons around the perimeter of the face had to be pressed in a certain sequence. Getting dressed I might snag the first button on my belt while tucking in my shirt. Without knowing it, I had just changed the mode to set the alarm. Sometime later on I might try to read the dial at night and go to press the illumination button but mistakenly press a different one instead. The alarm had now been activated. Finally, I might hit the third button by bending my wrist at a certain angle and accidentally depressing it. The alarm had now been set to go off.
And since I never changed the alarm time it always sounded at 2 A.M.
Mystery solved.
That a series of trivial and unconnected acts can conspire to wake me up in the middle of the night is not surprising. In fact, it is a basic fact of life among the machines. The MOIO Factor at work. What is more remarkable is that the technology can accomplish something by itself that I cannot do with full use of my intelligence. I hope this is due to the complexities of the expanding technocosm rather than to my shriveling IQ.
Exhibit #1: the instructions for my watch include eight diagrams, five charts, and such classic directions as “press C while in the Alarm mode (after D - A - C) to change the alarm and time signal in the following sequence ( alarm on, alarm off, alarm only, time only)”.
This is verbatim from the booklet.
I rest my case.
Exhibit #2: like most folks, I have turned the multi-function DVD player into a movie projector. I never use all the functions. Not because the machine is bad but because the instructions are. In fact, disinstruction and misguidance have become a way of life in the new world.
I cringe, for example, every time I have to buy a new piece of software because I know for an absolute fact that the manual, guidebook, or instructions will be impossible to comprehend. The latest one came with a 700-page tome that read like Husserl without the humor.
Why is it so hard to get clear instructions?
One reason is that the writing of instructions is actually a high art. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. Draw a doodle on some paper, then call up a friend and try to instruct them to recreate it at their end. You will instantly bump up against the fact that language is highly interpretive and ambiguous. This is as true for manual instructions as it is for directions to the nearest gas station.
A second reason for the lack of good instructions is that as machines evolve, they not only get more complex but more general, addressing more and different kinds of procedures. Typewriters were for typing; computers do a lot more. And the more they do, the more steps and procedures are needed to set them up, hook them in, fix, or run. The first dry copier involved 18 separate steps to get a single copy; current models only require two or three…unless you want to do something other than make a single copy, which of course you can and which shoves you back in the world of explanations and directions.
Which brings us to another reason for the confusion…electronics have overtaken mechanics. Even early TVs were mechanical contraptions with the kind of spinning lenses and motors that any screwball with screwdriver could wreck. Now they are all microchipped and there is simply no way to get in and muck around.
Voice recognition, intuitive controls, and online computerized help are all in the works. But until these pan out – if they ever do – our shelves and hard drives will continue to fill up with disinstructions and misguides. Most of these are coldly written, imposingly dense yaddalogs…that’s short for yadda-yadda-yadda-logs. Look at this entry, for example, from the User's Manual for the e-mail system at a university in New York. This is the first mention of the Web in the manual (and the manual is about the Web) and it is on page 156.
"One way to bootstrap into the maze of services that is the Internet is to use File Transer Protocol or FTP. To learn how to use FTP read IP Addresses (page 146), Domain Names (Page 147) and FTP (page 150).”
Typical.
How about a manual that assumes you want to get one specific task done at a time. Written as though you were writing for your kid sister, assuming that the two of you get along. Starting with naming the task you are trying to accomplish, then listing the steps, numbered 1,2,3, etc.
And what about a lighter touch, like this little piece of technohaiku:
Pressing the restart mode
again, yet still it’s blinking
I try not to weep.
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