OPINION: Looking for directions

I read the instructions again, focusing this time on the word ‘instill.’ Hmmm. I tried putting a tiny dab of the stuff on my pinky and then smearing it on my eyelashes, hoping it would migrate downward and inward, as shampoo always seems to, and instill itself. I tried squeezing a dot of it onto a Q-tip and inserting it into a corner of my eye. Ay-yi-yi! All very silly and unsuccessful, but at least funny, until you realize that in the meantime my infection was progressing.

Finally I admitted defeat and asked the pharmacist what to do. “Oh,” she said, “a ‘drop’ in this case really means a quarter-inch ribbon, and ‘instill’ means pulling down your lower lid” – she demonstrated – “and squeezing the ointment into it.” Oh. Good. Only by now the infection was raging, and I needed a second medication to add to the first.

So — is it just me, or is it actually true that as life grows more complex, the instructions grow more inscrutable? My walking buddy, Marie, answered the phone the other day and said, “I can’t talk right now. I’m trying to download the new security software onto my computer.” I hung up immediately, in awe of her courage. My own attempts at such things have invariably ended in disaster, usually with the dreaded ‘blue screen of death.’

And yet, I’m good at reading instructions. I cook like a chemist, following a recipe line by line as if my life depended on it, which of course it sometimes does. I mean, a careless cook can poison people! If cookbooks had instructions as careless and unhelpful as the instructions that come with electronic devices, the publishers would be sued. And if they were printed in the same teeny-tiny type as these other manuals, the publishers would be out of business.

My vacuum cleaner manual doesn’t even have words – just faint line drawings. (At least, they look faint to me. But then, my eyes have ointment in them.) More than once I’ve found myself kneeling on the floor, crawling around the vacuum cleaner and peering at it from different angles, trying to figure out what the drawings meant. And once I packed the whole thing in the car and drove to Athens with it, to consult the expert at the Clean Living Store, who snapped the thing back together in ten seconds. I bet he has the secret manual with words in it!

Oh, well. My favorite idea about manuals comes from a billboard I saw on Tybee Island. I hope it’s still there. It said, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” And it had a picture of the Bible.

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.