How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Follow Instructions

Anyone familiar with Italian cafés knows—and has suffered from—those high-tech sugar bowls that are activated by the customer's attempt to remove the spoon from the bowl. At the first, faint tug, the bowl's lid comes down like a guillotine, causing the spoon to fly into the air, scattering sugar throughout the immediate vicinity, while the victim mentally consigns the inventor of this device to a concentration camp. But, on the contrary, that genius is probably enjoying the fruits of his crime on the remote and exclusive beach of some island paradise. The American humorist Shelley Berman once suggested that in the near future the same genius will invent a totally secure automobile, whose doors will open only from the inside.

For a number of years I drove a car that was, in many respects, excellent—except for the fact that the driver's ashtray was set inside the left-hand door. As everyone knows, a driver grips the wheel with his left hand, keeping his right hand free to deal with the gearshift and the various knobs and dials. If you also smoke with your right hand, depositing the ashes in a receptacle to the left of your left shoulder becomes quite a complex operation, one requiring you to remove your eyes from the road ahead. And if the car, like the one I am describing, can attain a speed of eighty miles per hour, the few seconds' distraction it takes to knock ash into the ashtray can mean sodomizing a Mack truck. The gentleman who invented this system was a serious professional who has caused the death of many people, not through tobacco-related cancers but through collisions with a foreign body.

I have a passion for word-processing systems. If you buy one of these programs, you are given a package with some diskettes, instructions, and a guarantee, which costs anywhere between eight hundred thousand and a million lire. For instruction, you can have recourse either to a company-provided instructor or to the manual. The instructor has usually been trained by the inventor of the sugar bowl mentioned above, and it is advisable to empty a Magnum into his chest the moment he sets foot inside your door. They'll give you perhaps twenty years (less, if you have a smart lawyer), but you will still be saving yourself time.

The real trouble starts when you consult the manual (what I now have to say applies to any manual for any kind of computer program or device). A computer manual appears to be a plastic container with sharp corners, which you must not leave within reach of the children. When you slip the contents out of this container, they seem to be a number of booklets bound in reinforced concrete, and therefore impossible to transport from living room to study. Their titles are conceived in such a way as to prevent you from understanding which should be read first. The less sadistic firms usually give you only two; the more perverse organizations offer as many as four.

Your immediate impression is that the first manual explains things step by step, for the retarded, while the second is addressed to experts, the third to professionals, and so on. Wrong. Each booklet says things that the others do not say; the things you need to know at once are in the manual for engineers, the information for engineers is in the manual for the retarded. Moreover, on the assumption that in future years you will amplify the manual, they are bound in loose-leaf style, with three hundred sheets or more.

Anyone who has handled a loose-leaf notebook knows that, after it has been consulted once or twice, apart from the difficulty in turning the pages, the rings bend out of shape, and soon the binder explodes, shedding leaves all over the room. Human beings accustomed to seek information are used to dealing with objects called books, perhaps featuring pages with color-coded edges or indentations, as in address books, so that readers can promptly find what they need. The authors of computer manuals are unaware of these humane conveniences and supply objects that last about eight hours. The only reasonable solution is to dismember the manuals, study them for six months under the guidance of an Etruscologist, condense them into four file cards (which will be enough), and throw the originals away.

1985