Please read the manual!

Reading manuals that come with your devices is good for your health and will boost your confidence by some amount. At least when it comes to operating them. You might find surprising info there!

Photo of an old Macintosh PageMaker manual.

When I was a teen and tween, I was a very rebellious person. No one should tell me how to live my life, especially not my parents. I’m fairly sure you can resonate with this.

However I’m almost 40 years old as of writing this blog post, and I feel like people around my age never really grew out of this. I know, because almost daily I run into someone who exclaims something like “Oh, I didn’t know you were supposed to do X!!” when operating some sort of a machinery they bought / use which is ... weird?

All of those machines have manuals. The manuals tell you how they work. They also tell you the required maintenance steps that you need to do to keep it in working condition. The exclamation that they didn’t know they were supposed to do X tells me they didn’t bother reading the manual.

Why the hell not? No one is going to become less of a person if you read the manual!

Go read the manual! You’re not supposed to instinctively know how your machine (car, kettle, toaster, circular saw, TV, washing machine, whatever) works. Especially if you moved countries.

Not reading the manual is also not cool. How would you describe a person who chose not to look up something even though the info is readily available, and costs nothing?

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash