Instructions are prevalent in our daily lives. Everything we do from playing a sport to reading a book all have or began with instructions. I was amazed when looking through my apartment for examples of instructions at how many I have. The sad realization I came to was that I have only read at best 5% of the instructions in my apartment.
Quite often we as a society are so eager to set up our new television or put music on our ipod that we miss out on much of the useful information in these instructions manuals. Most instruction manuals not only contain the simple installation instructions that we expect, but contain helpful tips and tricks to make operation easier. Only after failure do we look at how the item in question actually works. An example from my own life is the television in my room. When one of the video inputs on the side of the TV where I hook up my DVD player began to malfunction I looked to the manual. Only then did I realize that I can hook my ipod and camera directly into the TV for viewing pictures and listening to music. These features, especially charging my ipod, have now been utilized frequently. I only wish that I could have been maximizing the potential of this television earlier. I'm now trying to at least skim the instructions manuals of all of the new things I buy to maybe find some interesting features. You should too.
For your viewing pleasure here is a video of funny baby instructions I found while perusing Youtube. Enjoy.
I have encountered similar situations when you finally read instructions and realize how much more you can do with a program/electronic. Its always a bummer when you finally realize this, but at the same time exciting that you found these new capabilities out!
ReplyDeleteWould either of you like to explain how this works to my mother. Her idea of reading the instructions for the DVD player is picking up her cell phone and calling me! Instructions can be great but sometimes experience is the best teacher. Would instructions ever be sufficient for something like teaching a person to operate a car? Some things are best learned the hard way.
ReplyDeleteOnly 5%? Really?
ReplyDeleteActually, I have no problem believing that. I think there's something just ingrained in guys & engineers that says "I don't need instructions! I've got this!" ... and I feel like I can say that since the majority of my family is made up of guys & engineers!
I always at least skim instructions, though, for the reason you mentioned here. You learn so much random stuff that you didn't know before! Especially with appliances!
Its funny how we have things, especially electronics, that are only doing half of what they were made to do because we don't take the time to read the instructions and figure out what we could really do with our equipment. I have a cell phone that has all kinds of "extras" on it that are doing nothing because I wont take the time to figure out how to work it.
ReplyDeletePS. The video is great!!