posted January 24, 2014 07:51 PM
quote:
http://inoveryourhead.net/do-you-read-the-manual/ When it comes to computers, there are two kinds of people in the world: Those that try, and those that read the manual.
If you experiment, that means that when you’re in a new program, trying to save a document or something, you click around: “Let’s see, how about ‘Edit’? Nope… maybe ‘File’? Ah, there it is! Save.” Then you save the document. See, it took a while, but you figured it out.
If you read the manual, it’s the opposite. You don’t know how to do something and you kind of freeze, call somebody for tech support, or you might reach for the manual.
Someone who used to be a neighbor of mine taught computers at some community college and a real tech geek bought himself a personal radio with a vox, apparently for all its cool stuff and also how to "halve the time of our shopping" by coordinating with his wife who'd also have a vox (just don't forget to pick up batteries!). But unfortunately for him he couldn't get the vox to work (only one radio could receive) and he'd lost the manual. I told him he could probably find the manual OL but he said he was sick of fighting with it (without the manual) so I offered to do it for $20 which he accepted.
I took it home and first thing I did was find the manual online (at the very least I wanted to ask the people at Radio Shack something more intelligent than "can you make this work?" 
) and went straight to their "if it's not working (then plug it in and switch to ON) section" so that I spent less time reading it than I did loading it. It was enough info right there to inspire me to just flip through their menus on both radios at the same time to make sure everything matched. One screen didn't, so I changed it. And it worked. I'm guessing the entire process of fixing the vox once I sat down to do it was 2 minutes, maybe 3 if you include loading the manual.
Easiest $20 I made, thanks to reading the manual. To preserve his ego (and make sure I still got my $20) I waited at least an hour to go back and insinuated I'd spent the entire time figuring it out. 
And that also helped start some hilarity of me and a girl being a hacker. I showed the girl how to access the logs which she then did to find a YT video at a friends when her friend couldn't find it...which happened to be on the mother's computer who saw this and as she'd still been signed into YT the computer brought up the YT vid in her account...and the mother freaked assuming my girl had just hacked her account! My girl tried to explain but the mother wasn't listening (other than I showed her how to do that). There was a little more fuel to the fire including that mother talking to the wife of the computer teacher whose vox I fixed. Too bad more people don't ever read the manuals and just try to muddle through because in the land of the blind the one eye woman is queen.
Lindaland
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posted January 24, 2014 07:45 PM