Manual labour

You can survive without ever reading an instruction manual.

The last photograph I took with my Sony Ericsson T610 was that of a weirdly shaped carrot. That was almost a year ago. My phone also has WAP and a WAP Push function, neither of which I have ever used. It has got lots of other things which I never intend to use.

Why did I buy it? Well, I didn't. It was gifted to me by my dear sister-in-law; I just use it to make calls and am still trying to be creative with text messaging. Similarly, my PC is seven years old and has something called Intel Celeron in it.

The last time I mentioned it to one of my numerous IT friends, he gave me a look reserved for people who take a bath only occasionally. My Pioneer DVD system was bought because someone who knows these things (in this case Shumi) told me it works well.

I bought a Siemens washing machine because a good friend said it is the BMW of washing machines and I got a Siemens refrigerator because it was the largest, and hence the one that could hold the maximum number of beer bottles. Now comes the most important line of this article: I have not read the instruction manual for any of these. Before you wonder how I have managed not to blow up the house, read on.

I can consider myself to have enough intelligence to use a rather intuitively designed cell phone, right? After all, I test cars for a living. And to be honest with you, I tried my luck with the 95-page instruction manual but was too smart to realise that the section "What do the icons mean" came up only on the 88th page.

Obviously, I read that first and threw the book away. I have used only a fraction of what my computer can do but I can still write stories, pour tea into the keyboard (that is really fun), connect to the Net and send my stories to the office too.

Sure, it doesn't run NFS Underground and I am glad because my 10-year-old son thinks a C-Plus grade in school is better than an A-Minus grade. Luckily, my wife read the instruction manuals for the washing machine and fridge (as in noted down the numbers of the service centre) but I hardly see her change a washing cycle to suit denim or change the optimum temperature setting of the deep freezer to suit a chicken leg.

Well, the moral of the story is that you can just about survive without reading boring instruction manuals. But wait a minute. Not with cars! Last week I read the 200-page instruction manual to my spanking new, bright red Suzuki Swift ZXI.

And I read every word of it "" because it was well written, made allowances towards fairly intelligent people (still, it had a page which teaches you how to drive and I am certain the moron who sideswiped me the other day learnt to drive using an instruction manual) and even had funny looking illustrations (how about an airbag blowing its guts out on a child sitting in a child seat?) which even those who couldn't read English would understand.

I felt stupid that I didn't know certain elementary things about cars with airbags and ABS (those airbags may not deploy if I hit a pole head on "" should remember that). Seriously, you better read these things if you buy a new car!

And then came the instruction manual for the Blaupunkt Bremen MP74 music system. It has only 180 pages. I am confident I will read it one of these days. Actually, make that years.