Operating manuals for illiterates

Well I can't complain about grammatical mistakes in the operating manual of the appliance I bought yesterday. There was a long set of safety instructions translated into several languages. Don't dump into a tub of water. Don't cut the cable... All standard, and nothing that I was planning on doing. However, the actual instructions came down to two pages of cryptic drawings that I am unable to decipher. There is not a single word in any language about how to use this thing. Long searches online also only came up with the same pages, shrunk into a single PDF page.

Needless to say, I will NOT be buying any more appliances from AEG any time soon.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I do read the manuals, usually before unpacking the new item. I save them and refer back to them later if I have questions. But I am not going to sit and puzzle out what these drawings might mean. I'm going to work out how to use this by trial and error.

Odd that "how to use" was all drawings, and "how not to kill yourself" was all text. The kindest interpretation I can think of is that the "how not to kill yourself" bits were mandated by regulators. (That's actually interesting to me as a regulator.) There is a view around that the need for a written user manual for anything is a confession of failure.

Hieroglyphics are easier to read than most manuals now. That being said, I can't begin to decipher text messages that are just strings of emojis.

Edited to fix a typo

>3 WholeHouseLibrary: That's my guess as well, or else they are afraid of court cases if someone's five-year-old picks it up and throws it in the bathtub and climbs in. Besides, this is standard stuff that they already have used hundreds of times.

Of course the warranty is invalid if you don't use it properly. The warranty information is written out.

There is not a single word in any language about how to use this thing.

I hate that! I bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner a few years ago, and had to call customer service three times for help assembling it because the instructions were just confusing graphics.

Assembly directions I can usually manage, but so often the diagrams don't mention that orientation matters. Or differentiate between two lengths of screws.

Jerry said last night that these diagrams would be good reminders if you already knew how to use the thing. Yes! but working from scratch on a type of machine that I have never had before, it isn't enough.

Now I'm curious at what machine it is. I've just bought an AEG fridge and the user manual is quite complete/as expected.

A hand vacuum cleaner. I have 2 big vacuum cleaners - The older one should really be retired, but keeping them on different floors means they are more easily, therefore more likely to be used. But even at that, getting a bit of dust or cobwebs, or spilt rice is more likely to happen quickly with a lighter, smaller one, and that goes double if the cobwebs are up on the ceiling.

I had to replace my propane-fired outdoor barbecue a few months ago. The grill had rotted out, the burner protection plates were falling apart, and the bottom actually dropped out of it. I couldn't get replacement parts for it. Bought it when I was still married to ThiMs and had 3 kids living in the house, so it had to be well over 20 years old.

Seeing as how I live alone now, I opted for a much smaller replacement, which, to save twenty bucks, I opted to assemble it myself. I was up to the challenge, I decided. It was all just diagrams; one shade of black on white paper -- almost impossible to determine what the pieces were or their orientation. I used the SWAG method: figured out what parts they wanted me to connect together in each step and I decided the orientation as I went along. (Having seen one fully assembled in the store helped a lot, mostly.)

The one really smart thing they did was to put all the screws, washers, etc. in one big blister pack. All the necessary miscellaneous parts for a given step were together in separate, well labeled packs. Made it so easy! But yeah, the diagrams were mostly worthless.

Some 50-60 years ago my dad told me that when they needed assembly instructions they sent the tech writer down to the factory floor. The foreman would pick the guy from the assembly line who would be missed the least and that's who would explain how the danged thing needed to be put together. It makes sense; the least qualified explaining to the clueless who then passes the confusion along.

At one point a few decades ago I translated welding machine directions from German to English. I never welded anything, never even watched welding being done. I did buy and read a college level welding textbook and a specialist multilingual dictionary. I wonder what purchasers made of those manuals. On the other hand, I read some of the translations that mine replaced. Mine have to have been an improvement.

These were really the olden days. I typed it all. On a typewriter. For you younger people, that is like a keyboard printer, but not plugged in. When you hit a key, if you hit it with enough energy, a stick would fly up and hit the paper through an inked ribbon. That stick had a letter shape that would print that shape on the paper. Then the printer part, with the paper on it, would move one spot on so that you could hit the next letter.

It’s obviously a cost thing: consumer electrical appliances have a very short product life-cycle, and translating, checking and printing a dozen versions of the instructions will add a disproportionate amount to the cost of a product at the cheap end of the range, not to mention the extra bulk and weight of all that paper. But the text-free instruction sheet is annoying, especially if it isn’t well thought out. I think the first ones I came across were from IKEA, and some of them involved a lot of puzzling out...

Most IKEA ones actually work, in my experience. They at least do a lot better than most others I've seen. You have to do things in their order, not try to cut corners, something I could never convince my husband of.

>13 MarthaJeanne: Or do as I do with IKEA: get them to build or install it. Best part is, they take the packaging away.

>14 haydninvienna: That's what we did last time. Before that I got the boys to help me. But children grow up, and just when you've got them to the point where they are really helpful, they move away.

But... but... assembling Ikea stuff is like giant Lego! One of the great perks of adulthood!!!
:)

>10 PhaedraB: " . . . the least qualified explaining to the clueless . . . "

Got a good laugh out of that one. If only this were an unusual circumstance!

>16 ScarletBea: My children, and now my grands, love to help assemble IKEA furniture.