'Real men don't need instructions'

Instruction manuals are for idiots!” a close friend blurted out as he watched me attempt to assemble the accessories of the new pink camera I had just purchased.

“It’s a waste of time, plain and simple,” he declared, taking the camera from me and inserting the wrist strap that I was fumbling with. We needed a pair of scissors to cut through the hard plastic-clad memory stick but, like the noble savage that he can sometimes be, he whipped out his car key and proceeded to puncture, battle with, and mutilate the rigid plastic casing in which it lay. 

He then proceeded to lecture me in a most humorous and entertaining way on the utter uselessness of instruction manuals. “Listen,” he said as he popped the camera’s memory card and battery into their respective slots, “Instruction manuals can kill you; they can give you a heart attack. They simply are not necessary. I always rely on stock knowledge. I like the experience of discovering and learning as I go along. It makes everything more interesting and always fresh. If it’s a car, I put in gas, and then I drive it. If it’s a watch, I wear it, and then tinker with whatever buttons I need one by one. If it’s a camera, I put in batteries, I point, and then shoot, shoot, shoot. 

“If it’s a phone I charge it; a TV, I plug it,” he enumerated. “If it doesn’t work, I hit it, which sometimes does the trick. If it’s a girl, I discover the right buttons to push as I get to know her.” By the time he was done with his brief and insightful monologue, he had gingerly placed the new, shiny, pretty-pink camera in my palm, now ready for use after a few turns of the wrist and plays of the hand. “There,” he said to me, smiling.

How was I, then, to question him? I paused, found a loophole, and then pursued another line of reasoning: “What if something goes wrong?”

“Ah,” he answered, “Then that’s the only time I would consult a manual. If something lights up in my car’s instrument panel then I open the darned thing. Otherwise, never.  Oh, wait, there was this one time I did to check the recommended tire pressure because it is almost always indicated in the cars’ door sticker. But that one time I thought it lower than usual, so I consulted the manual to double-check. But that was it, ever.”

One could never win with that friend of mine—too smart, too eloquent, and extremely quick on the draw. I contemplated everything he had said and, yes, he was right: most men don’t seem to bother themselves with reading such manuals. I wanted to get to the bottom of it so I asked around.

A former university classmate of mine, now a professor of economics, sent his answer from all the way in the US via text message and it read: “Men are stubborn, must I tell you that? We like to think, ‘I did this all by myself.’ We don’t want the help of others even if we may need it — least of all from some manual. And even if we did, we would never ask for it. It’s just not macho, you know? It’s just like asking for directions; it’s for sissies. It simply is not done!” 

Gosh, I thought: and men think women are complicated. Ha!

I asked my 10-year-old son, who just has a knack for putting things together, while he was assembling what looked like a mammoth Lego monster made of pieces as thin and tiny as matchsticks and Tic-Tac mints, “How come you never read instruction manuals?” He looked at me like I had just spoken to him in Greek and said, “Duh, Mom!”

I figured, if I asked men of more or less the same social stature and similar educational backgrounds, I would most probably get the same answers so I ventured away from the middle-aged, middle- and upper-class mode, and into the fray of working gentlemen — the backbone of our society. 

I was waiting for my kids to get out of school one afternoon and took the opportunity to chat up the long-time guard there, an amiable fellow, loved by all. I asked him if he reads instruction manuals. He said, “I have no time. When I first got my cell phone, I just charged it, and then started punching the keys. Before I knew it, it was working so no need for the manual. I don’t even know where it is.”

    I thought I had hit a gold mine when I chanced upon the Apple store while Christmas shopping. So I went in there with the sole intention of cornering an Apple genius and making him admit to reading instruction manuals, for how could he possibly not? He is in the business of computers.  I was confident I was going to get him one way or another.  First, I asked questions about the Mac Air for which I already knew the answers; I just needed some time to soften him up. 

After several minutes, I asked him about his job. He was very accommodating and seemed to enjoy talking about it so I kind of slipped the question right under his shirt collar. “Umm, you read instruction manuals, right? I mean, of course you do, you must, for this kind of job… getting all sorts of new computers that you’re unfamiliar with?” I delivered all these lines in a rapid-fire burst, hoping for him to simply be overwhelmed and intimidated into saying, “YES!  Okay? I read instruction manuals and I’m a man, so what?”

But, no. It wasn’t my lucky day. It was, in fact, not only a painful loss; it was quite a beating. His answer was: “No, I don’t read that stuff. We attend seminars when new products come in but we never really read manuals. I guess men are just true geniuses for putting stuff together and for getting them working.”

Dejected and with my head down, I trudged out of there. But in the next instant, I cheered myself up with the brilliant idea of asking women, instead: Why do you think men abhor instruction manuals? I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with something clever.

The first female friend I asked said, “It’s elementary; it’s male ego overriding common sense. They think it makes them look wimpy if they read instructions. With men, it all boils down to ego. Shh… don’t tell anyone I said that, okay?” She will kill me because her words are now in print. And I knew that most women would come up with similar answers — not the most unbiased — so I abandoned the effort altogether.

I have a handful of female friends who have very mechanical minds. They can assemble brand-new flat-screen TVs, connect all the wiring by themselves, and get it working in two shakes of a rabbit’s tail. They can connect Internet routers and reconfigure several computers in the same house to form networks. They can dismantle faulty icemakers from refrigerators, replace the hose, reattach it to the water source and the main electrical outlet and get it operational within the next hour. All this without looking at instruction manuals; so they definitely are not the best people to ask either.

We all have at one point or another opened an instruction manual, but whether we read it or not is another story. Here are my thoughts on the matter: they always contain a nightmare of technical terms. I somehow feel that manufacturers assemble a bunch of nerds to author them using terms that are beyond the grasp of the average user. They are written by those who already know how the items operate, therefore they do not write from the perspective of a person who is seeing it for the first time. They make assumptions considering only their technical point of view. And may I just please add that their writing skills often leave a lot to be desired.

Yes, it is difficult to express complex step-by-step operations in simple language and on paper, especially when three-dimensional objects are involved and when the users’ level of technical expertise is so often inferior to that of the writer.  Instruction manuals are almost doomed to failure even before they are launched. Plus, the fonts are always puny, ergo, tedious to read, so who’s to bother with them?

Manual directions are often ambiguous at best and most of the time they are all you have to separate success from failure when attempting to make something work. So if you read the manual and fail, then you’re left thinking that you just might be an idiot. Then again, if you don’t read it and you fail, you still have an excuse.

Here’s my little secret: I never read them, either.

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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com or visit my blog at www.fourtyfied.blogspot.com.