Why is it that the makers of television sets, video recorders, mobile phones - and a vast array of similar appliances insist on writing the instruction manual in Swahili ?
It might as well be in Swahili for all the sense it makes to the average person.
The fundamentals of these appliances are certainly space age, but what the average person wants to know could easily be condensed to plain language instructions. There is not much point in referring to the controls by the technical jargon understood by technicians if that leaves the purchaser unable to identify what needs to be done.
This has now reached the point where a whole new sub-strata of technician has emerged. Having bought the item you need to find one of these technicians to come and install the product and show you how to control it - and they usually charge a fifty dollar fee for that service.
But - times are changing. The downturn in the economy has made electrical goods much harder to sell, and as a consequence more and more retailers are adding the words " we deliver and install " to their sales pitch.
Now all that is needed is for the product manufacturers to add a step by step instruction in plain English - completely removing jargon - so that the moderately gifted consumer can figure out how to install frequently celled numbers in a mobile phone or hookup a video recorder.
Hopefully - the job of writing the instruction booklet may pass from a technical boffin to a real person. That would be a form of progress welcomed by many !
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