I’m officially at my wit’s end. I have been struggling to figure out how to use my new camera, but it refuses to even catch my eye. If it weren’t so expensive, I would have just set it down on a curb somewhere and walked away from it completely. Might still.
Technology and I do NOT speak the same language and neither of us will ever make any sort of effort to eradicate that.
That isn’t quite fair—technology and I may have just gotten off on the wrong foot with each other. The real blame behind most of the misunderstandings between us can be directly and succinctly traced back to the people who write the instruction booklets and on-line manuals for the parade of technical devices that end up in front of me year after year. My beef is with those guys.
Being an instruction booklet writer carries the smell of that kid in high school who wanted the rest of us to know that he/she was way smarter than we were. They used unnecessarily big words in order to impress the teacher with their vast knowledge and to reinforce to the class that their intellectual gifts were being wasted amongst our unwashed masses.
I have never given a second thought to that kid but now I see that, against the odds, they ended up being employable after all. And that they got a job working for the manufacturer of my new camera. The joke’s on me.
The thing about technology is that with each new version of whatever sort of device we’re talking about, a fresh round of bells and whistles are added to free up the loads of time it apparently took us to operate the previous version. And the new options are lionized because they do away with all of the problems and inconveniences that we stumbled over with the last one.
However, unless I’m emailing when I’ve been drunk (and again, I’m sorry to those of you who have gotten emails from me when that’s clearly been the case), I don’t ever remember suggesting to anyone that these issues actually WERE my problems. Technology companies must have departments that make up my problems for me because each new round of time/effort/space saving hacks just replace the processes that I formerly knew how to operate. I don’t think I’m alone in that objection.
The number of mind-numbing abilities that this tiny camera of mine possesses is truly baffling, and to turn in despair to the instruction manual for explanation or to find a way to counteract the camera’s zealous over-automation, frequently leads me down a rabbit hole of complete confusion. The company uses words that have no business being used together in a sentence, and they mistakenly assume that I have been fervently keeping up with all of their company-specific jargon, which they therefore have no further need to explain. I don’t think they can even allow themselves to fathom a world where their cleverly designed and super-complicated features would not be welcomed with anything but open arms and a truly grateful heart.
But part of the problem also lies with us: the instruction manual audience. We continue to operate under the ridiculous assumption that we are the only ones who have absolutely no idea of what the acronyms are supposed to stand for or what the nonsensical phrases mean. And rather than admit to that obvious truth and complain to the people in charge, we spend hours researching and trying to make sense of these obscure terms before circling back to whatever sentence we were trying to figure out at Square One when we lost our thread in the first place. Shouldn’t we just change the situation? Goodness knows there are enough of us!
In my ideal world, there would be 2 sets of instruction manuals with every single technological device sold. One would be written by that kid from high school for the benefit of those who fully geek out over that sort of pretentiousness, and the other instruction booklet would be written for the rest of us in the same blunt manner as the instructions on a bottle of shampoo. “Wet hair, shampoo, rinse, repeat”. If we absolutely need more information, we could try something along the lines of “Wet hair, shampoo, rinse, repeat…although that second time is just suggested if your hair is SUPER dirty, or if you use really cheap styling products, or if you haven’t bathed in a while—otherwise it’s basically just a cash grab.” That addresses what to do and why and still allows US to choose the option that best applies to our own situation. Instead, we are left to feel like we are Neanderthals merely because we can’t even get through the included ‘quick start’ 60-page manual, let alone the 344 page on-line instructional pdf, without getting glassy-eyed and nodding off.
Although I know next to nothing, I do realize that simplifying the instruction manual for any form of technology so that it is comprehendible to the large percentage of its market who are non-industry-savvy clients, is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Modern technology writers have come this far and, by gum, will NOT have us wandering off or figuring out how to use the equipment without them.
I suppose that’s fair. We should have been nicer to them in high school.
