Slot A
Apparently the instructions aren’t as easy as the IKEA ones.
I used to build the store window displays back in the days when I worked at the Dizney Store. A fellow store co-hort and I would put the heavily schematic-ized display together… usually with some very unDizney like words… I remember the instructions as being difficult to get at times.
Maybe it’s supposed to have an MC Escher type vibe.
It also be the case that the Artistic side of the brain is at war – or certainly at toy-with – the Engineering side of the brain.
It’s amazing how that gray matter works. Something that is understood and easily done by one person is an utter mystery to another person.
It may not be a working shelf, but you can sell it as “art”!
Stereo instructions. Or even some of our fish ladders or other hardware or machinery at work. All of theese have one thing in common. POOR INSTRUCTIONS!!!
That’s me and about a third of the furniture in my house.
I notice a lot of people mix up their g’s and q’s when spelling. Maybe this is another symptom of that?
Jack… yah… or a real avant garde feel.
Pete… brains is mystery… and food if yer a zombie.
Dada… hmmm… slap some paint on it and you may be onto something.
squid fella… I think IKEA’s instructions work well…
EofO… wouldn’t you say that IKEA furniture instructions work well?
uwg… that could be it… if you mix up yer “p’s and q’s”…. yer getting short changed. That’s why yer supposed to watch them.
AND… Happy Birthday, Mischugenah! Have you gorged yourself on cupcakes yet? And did you go for chocolate with chocolate frosting? or vanilla cake with chocolate frosting…? or neither? And please tell me you had sprinkles!!!!
i get these all the time. cardboard ones. designed and written by someone for whom english isn’t a native language. neither is the logic (or lack thereof) found anywhere in the destructions (that’s what i call ’em, anyway).
i empathize.
And there is always that wisenheimer who looks at the parts, ignores the instructions, and just puts the thing together, sometimes after multiple attempts by others have failed.
At work, that wisenheimer is me.
Which means that they will SAVE those horrible thankless jobs until I come in…. Even when it is something that they COULD do. Razzin’, frazzin’, technophobic luddite stones of peaches…. (What, you thought that calling myself a grump was irony or something? š )
firedome… HA! You are the second person I know who have called instructions “destructions!” This tickles me. And you know the insanity of which I speak. Yes, non-native English speakers creating How-to’s may not be best.
Grump…. you live up to your name, you say? Wonderful. Ye Olde Wisenheimer might be a good screen name me things…. although that is mixing ancestries… are you perhaps German? … In which case, assembling and organizing and building should be a cinch… I have lots of German in me (which fights with the French parts of me)… which would explain a lot of confusement I normally have.
Deutscher? Nein, mein Freundin – of Eire my forefathers were born.
But… two years of Technical German and having Jewish neighbors when a child left me with both a smattering of German and a wee bit of Yiddish. (Yiddish has more insults than any other language that I can name, and it’s a German dialect….)
When I was considering a career in the hard sciences Technical German was a required course – particularly for Chemistry and for Physics. And, yes, part of that was the way German grammar works – why use a dozen words when one word will do, especially if that one word IS all of those dozen words strung together? š
Der Altercocker
Grump… I get a kick out of German… we were watching Househunters International the other day… and the German motorway signs were cracking me up! Ausfahrt…. hee hee…. I probably shouldn’t be let into Germany… I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing.