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Oliver Cross: User manuals and sibling rivalry
Woodhouse's own columnist supreme Oliver cross talks user manuals and sibling rivalry
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Caution! Food cooked in a microwave oven may be hot
A few weeks ago I heard a very odd but enjoyable programme on Radio 4 about the joy of instruction manuals.
Apparently some people collect and treasure instruction manuals and it's widely accepted in the instruction manuals community that the finest example of the genre is the cheerful little booklet given out with the old Box Brownie camera (which is more properly called the Brownie box camera, the most popular example being the Brownie 127, made from 1952 to 1967, as anybody sad enough to collect instruction manuals would be delighted to tell you).
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The manual welcomes you to the Brownie club, hopes you have lots of fun and gives you helpful hints on taking good pictures.
But that was in the days of innocence; instruction manuals are now sinister and frightening and, in terms of providing instructions, near to useless.
I haven't read one for years because the only new things I've bought this century – mobile phones and computers – have such impenetrable instructions that it's easier to just ask the kids.
However, the new kitchen has brought lots of new appliances, including a Hitachi MSE23 (even the name sounds wilfully complicated and unfriendly) microwave oven.
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Nowhere in the instruction manual does it congratulate me on having chosen the good old MSE23 or wish me well to use it; it starts with a list of 21 Precautions followed by 19 Important Safely Instructions, which basically cover the 30 ways I could kill or injure myself using a microwave oven, assuming I'm an idiot or a terrorist ('Do not immerse cord or plug in water', 'Do not use corrosive chemicals in this appliance', 'Do not tamper with or attempt or defeat the safety interlocks', 'This oven is especially designed to heat. It is not designed for industrial or laboratory use'. And so on, until they've reduced you to a quivering wreck).
A modern Brownie box manual, before telling you not to point the lens into the sun, would have to tell you not to take photographs in windy conditions near cliffs, or in conditions of civic unrest, or underneath falling aeroplanes.
Mind you, the MSE23 crew don't mention the importance of not attempting to heat compact discs in microwave ovens, which I'm told could lead to a spectacularly entertaining explosion. This is shocking forgetfulness on the part of the instruction manual writers and I'm tempted to try a CD/microwave experiment just so I can complain to the joyless, risk averse, safety-obsessed, totalitarian creeps – and if I sound a little bitter it's because the most useful thing I've ever found to do with a microwave, using it to time boiled eggs, is now forbidden because it is apparently dangerous to switch on an empty microwave, which restricts me to using it for reheating cold tea or drying damp socks and underwear, which is hardly worth the risk.
The sharp end of sibling rivalry
While clearing the decks in readiness for our new kitchen, I had to deal with a big, bedraggled, disorderly pile of my own columns.
Which I did by stuffing them, still totally unsorted, into a new carrier bag because I don't like dwelling on the past and this column, although up-to-the-minute each Friday, is also instant history, that being the nature of a diary-type column and sometimes I wonder why I bother.
Even so, I did have a quick scan to see whether I could recycle any items from the columns carrier bag without the readers noticing.
And I hope the readers don't notice too much because I realised, while doing my scan-through, that I've used last week's picture of the Shufflebottoms, a family of Yorkshire fairground knife-throwers, before.
My defence is that each time the picture was used to illustrate a different point and here it is for a third time for you to consider the remarkable way it represents a frozen-in-time family dynamic and, incidentally, how difficult it is to find pictures for a column which doesn't generally mention national celebrities, so that if you're fed up of seeing the Shufflebottoms twice in a fortnight, you should just think yourself lucky you're not getting yet another daily dose of Peter Andre.
Anyway, here I invite you to consider how glamorous, athletic Miss Florence Shufflebottom must feel at having her glum-looking, podgy young brother Garry stealing the limelight just by standing there and risking death.
Also, Garry must have been born at exactly the wrong time for a young girl used to getting her own way and not needing the distraction of a new brother, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Florence, although smiling through like the trouper she is, isn't somewhere in her heart hoping that her dad might make a small – non-fatal, of course – error in the throwing-knives-at-the-horrible-little-squirt department.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 19 May 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 6 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North
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Cloudy
Temperature: 7 C to 12 C
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