Equipment Manuals

[Rod Upfold]

You would think that what we pay for a piece of equipment, that the manufactures could produce a descent manua.

Who has the worst manual?

Thank you

Rodl

[2manytoyz]

Only 1 comes to mind from the hundreds of tools I've bought for home and work... A milling machine from Grizzly was a literal translation from Chinese. Almost comical to read.

[Leon]

Cept probably Leigh.

[Charlie Self]

Leon responds:

Ya got me! You are correct. Their manuals are nearly unbelievable they're so good.

Charlie Self

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." Samuel Johnson

[Larry Jaques]

On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 16:19:28 -0400, Rod Upfold pixelated:

You'd think that, given the price we pay, a Wrecker could at least spell "manufacturers", "decent", and "manual", eh?

My vote goes to Harbor Fright for Japanese pre-translated Taiwanese-translated Engrish manuals from China. Y'know, they're usually the one-sheet jobs.

- Inside every older person is a younger person wondering WTF happened. ---

Website Application Programming

[Rich Andrews]

Larry Jaques wrote in news: [e-mail]:

The one that always cracked me up was a Sony manual that said that the signal was "sprit" 3 ways.

r

[CW]

[Charlie Self]

CW responds:

Ya hadda be there, I think, but...one helluva long time ago ('62), I was working for a small ad agency down on Williams St, in NYC; a friend bought one of the early Honda motorbikes, a 50cc buzzer. A great little "zip up the West Side Drive" vehicle if you were lucky enough to stay out of the way of the Pontiacs, Buicks, Fords and whatnot that made up the major sources of crumpled sheetmetal. The manual was damned near impossible to read without laughing. In fact, it was damned near impossible to read.

Charlie Self

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." Samuel Johnson

[Larry Jaques]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 04:10:06 -0000, Rich Andrews pixelated:

That must have been a Freudian srip.

- Inside every older person is a younger person wondering WTF happened. ---

Website Application Programming

[mttt]

I'll second that...

You'll usually find something along the lines of "Warning! Never before fingers to put! Correlation can be caustic or eye damage!" Admittedly, I'll spend the 60 seconds to see if I can make heads'er'tails out'a it.

[Rich Andrews]

Silvan wrote in news:sqvh31-ndb.ln1 @giganator.family.lan:

It helps to read the manuals out loud with a really bad Japanese accent as in "the lice bowl was sprit tree way by catawac dwiver". (:>)

r

[Ramsey]

[Charlie Self]

Larry Ramsey responds:

Damn. I had nearly forgotten the 305cc Honda Super Hawk I bought in, I think, '65. One neat motorcycle until I tried off-roading it a bit. But the manual was incredibly unreadable.

Charlie Self

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." Samuel Johnson

[Ward Cleaver]

Larry Jaques wrote in rec.woodworking

I once bought something at HF, don't remember what it was, but the manual was small xeroxed sheet of paper that actually had some handwritten info added at the bottom.

[2manytoyz]

It took me a while to find this website again, but it's worth the read:

[Silvan]

Same way we do, I think. British pronunciation is weird though. I find a lot of words that we Americans pronounce in a manner that I would expect to be more characteristic of the British, and vice versa.

[Silvan]

Yeah, I've seen that a lot. Usually really whispy thin paper at that.

[Jim K]

One of the reasons for this is that many companies use their engineers to write the user manual thereby saving the cost of a dedicated technical writer (yes - I is a tech wroter). As an example I've been having a long battle with our engineers about a button in our Internet interface. It says "delete mailbox." We get about a call a month from customers who wonder if this will delete (as in destroy) their e-mailbox. All it really does is "empty mailbox." Your next e-mail will be delivered with no problem.

They won't change the button because technically it does delete the mailbox, but reconstructs it with the next e-mail. I've tried to argue that the customer really doesn't care about being technically accurate, they just want to empty out their mailbox.

Thanks for lett>You would think that what we pay for a piece of equipment, that the