Instructions

I don’t ‘do’ instruction manuals well. I can’t understand them when I first read them, if I read them at all, which is rarely, and then I lose them as soon as I’m done so I can’t refer to them again later. So over the last 6 months I’ve had a pilot light on my gas fireplace that I can’t get re-lit, a light blinking on my battery charger whose message is lost on me, a “time to replace the filter” light going on in my refrigerator when I didn’t know where the filter was (I didn’t even know WHAT the filter was until my sister explained, when she was here) and two Adirondack chairs that got put together crooked at first because I put ‘tab A’ in front of, instead of behind ‘slot B.’ Good grief.

You’d think that reading instruction manuals would come easily for me. I am somehow compelled by habit to read everything else I come across – road signs, ads, box tops, the privacy policy they give you at the doctor’s office. (Well maybe in that case there just wasn’t anything else but 'Field and Stream' in the office, but you get the point.)

The problem is that ‘instructions’ aren’t really readable. They don’t have plot or characters or setting and they don’t even have coherent sentences. I figure that I can make a reasonable guess (in the case of the chairs) or just ignore the possibility of a problem (unidentified blinking lights?) and get away with it. Or have to redo it several times until subsequent guessing turns out to be right. Or until Janet comes to visit – she who CAN read instruction manuals.

Life is more interesting this way, after all.