Marquis de Sade, Author of Owner’s Manuals

IT’S MY OWN fault for dumping my little Motorola StarTac phone (which tends to disappear in a shirt pocket) and getting one of those jazzy new Nokias with a bunch of “advanced” features.

I don’t claim technical electronic expertise. I do claim basic literacy. So my first decision-making a phone call-didn’t strike me as one that required an advanced engineering degree.

I’m used to “Gotcha!” instructions. These were insidious, because they didn’t seem to fall into the “Gotcha!” category. To make a call, enter the numbers and press Call. Press what? Nothing on this phone is labeled “Call.” Oh, just a second…here’s a button with “C” on it. That must stand for “Call.”

Nope. “C” stands for everything but “Call.” It starts erasing the numbers. Terrific. Where’s “Call “? Oh, it’s that key with nothing but a horizontal bar on it. Why doesn’t the owner’s manual get into sync with what’s on the phone?

All right, I now know how to make a call. Now, how do I end the call? The manual tells me in two words: “Press End.” Hey, manual, I don’t think so. There’s no “End” in sight. And to compound your sadistic obfuscation, you show a diagram of every button on the face of this phone. None of them indicates any relationship with “End.” Of course, I can always slide the battery out. That’ll end it. What a marvelous electronic advance!

Well, wait a minute. There’s the word “End” in the little window, taunting me. I’ll press that bar with the horizontal line on it.

Archimedes in the bathtub-Eureka! It ends the call! Just one question: Why doesn’t the owners manual say “Press the bar when the word ‘End’ appears in the window”? I guess it’s because the Marquis de Sade, who wrote this manual, wouldn’t think that’s playing the game.

Speaking of games, the manual says I can use my phone to play three games: “Memory,” “Snake” and “Logic.” Sure…except they aren’t games. “Memory” is what I have to use instead of the manual to remember what does what on this phone. “Snake” is the serpent who edited it. “Logic”? Well, I guess that is a “game” for this device.

On we go to my dependable old Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4 printer. Suddenly it wasn’t so dependable. It wouldn’t print, and on the computer screen was an instruction to adjust the “Timeout.” What the hell is a timeout?

I scanned the index of the owner’s manual. For about 30 seconds, my faith in humankind was restored. But that faith reverted back across the border behind agnosticism to standard cynicism when I read the cryptic instruction:

Timeout, measured in seconds, refers to the time the printer will wait before ending a print job. The default value is 15. The scroll increment is 10 (hold down + to scroll.) If, when using multiple ports, data from other ports appears in the middle of your print job, increase the timeout value.

Huh?

Maybe I’m not taking enough ginkgo biloba, or maybe I should have waited for the full moon. I couldn’t make the instruction compute. After much fiddling around with “Menu” on the printer, “Timeout” appeared on the tiny printer screen. Whee! I pressed the “+” button and the number rose from 15 to 30. That should do it!

Yeah, sure. I tried printing something, and that same instruction to adjust the Timeout popped onto the monitor. Aaargh! I called my computer guru, who admitted he had never heard of Timeout. After messing with it for an hour and puzzling over the manual and switching cables and trying to use the printer with another computer and cursing, he had a suggestion: Get another printer.

So I changed the printer default to my other printer, one designed for color, and limped along for a couple of days. Update: Trying to re-create the actual on-screen message for this report, I re-hooked the LaserJet 4 and asked it to print. It did, with no Timeout message. Somebody up there hates me.

Proof of that is my bete noire, the imported Gaggenau oven in the kitchen. Although the oven itself is a masterpiece of advanced German engineering, the manual obviously was designed as an elimination device for Mensa. Resetting the clock is a nasty adventure for this oven, which defiantly challenges a switch to daylight-saving time.

I’d guess, though, that the ultimate proof of owner’s manual inadequacy is the book of instructions accompanying word processing programs. For more than 10 years I’ve switched back and forth between WordPerfect and Microsoft Word. In both cases, I’ve gleaned more useful information from easy-to-read supplementary books I picked up at Barnes & Noble than from the manuals themselves. Heck, if the words about how to use words aren’t clear, how can we expect anything better from a phone or a printer or an oven?

So I have a suggestion for owner’s manual writers:

Assuming you really do want users to understand-and that’s a dubious assumption-and assuming you have a mother-another dubious assumption-here’s a reasonable litmus test of your creative output:

Use your mother as a guinea pig. Let her try to program the phone or fix the Timeout feature or set the oven clock, based on your instructions.

If she can’t follow your opaque instructions, just assume that neither can some of the rest of us.

Shock treatment is in order: Have whoever writes the owner’s manual for Nokia phones generate one for Hewlett-Packard manual writers, instructing them how to write their books. Have the Hewlett-Packard obfuscator write one for the MS Word owner’s manual writers. And for the ultimate indignity, have whoever writes Word’s manual tell their WordPerfect chums how to write manuals.

They’ll all either improve or go out of business. Either way, we’re ahead.