Dialogue: For once I read instructions - and I'm none the wiser

In an age of information overload, manufacturers' instructions that state the mind-bogglingly obvious are just about the last straw, says PAM WADE*.

I have just broken the habit of a lifetime and started reading instructions. It's been a revelation.

I don't know how I have managed to blunder this far through life without the benefit of the wealth of expert advice and guidance that is lavished on us these days.

I have, for example, taken a moment before ripping into almost any breakfast cereal you care to name to observe the serving suggestion on the front of the box. Apparently, you pour it into a bowl and add milk. Who would have thought it? The principle underlying manufacturers' instructions appears to be "assume nothing".

So it is that users of circular saws are advised to keep their hands and fingers away from the spinning blade. We are let in on the secret that soldering irons become hot and can cause burns and cautioned against attempting to drive a car while the steering-wheel lock is still in place.

I'm surprised they trust us to get these things out of the box by ourselves - ironically, often the most difficult and dangerous part of the whole operation, with blister packs so impregnable that they require power tools to hew open the plastic and liberate the precious dental floss within.

Presumably there's a legal side to all this. Perhaps the manufacturers have been caught out once too often, sued for thousands by literal-minded nerds who, for example, opening their roast chicken dinner for one have expected it to slide out on an ingeniously-folded table complete with checkered cloth, plate and cutlery, as illustrated.

I do know that it was an expensive excursion through the courts that led to McDonald's printing "Caution: Hot" on the sides of the polystyrene cups in which they serve their tea and coffee. One clumsy - and litigious - woman, spilling her hot drink in her lap one day, saw her chance and seized it.

No doubt they are now very touchy on the whole subject of public expectation and safety. It is only a matter of time before Big Mac boxes are emblazoned with the legend "Caution: Tastes of Cardboard".

It is harder, though, to imagine the circumstances that led China Air to label its little bags of peanuts with the advice "Open packet and consume contents". Surely anyone with enough nous to buy themselves an airline ticket and locate their departure gate would have had previous experience with vacuum-sealed nibbles?

But who knows? Perhaps there was a boom year for camel farming and an unprecedented flood of hick farmers trekked out of the Mongolian hinterlands eager for a taste of international jet-setting. Faced with a plane-load of Genghis Khan's descendants, the airline probably decided to take no chances. I expect their coffee cups are embossed "This Way Up".

Korea, however, has gone off in the opposite direction.

People wishing to buy nifty devices to enhance their in-car experience will find themselves directed by Dolpac, when installing their telephone indexer: "more easily to check or record the telephone on driving, please fix the place you want front or rear side of the sun visor after controlled visor clip. Be separated each 1 PC of card paper from the main body a recording tel will be newly."

This is equalled in opacity only by Renault's exhortation that, when changing a halogen headlight bulb, you should "never fail, under no circumstances, not to touch the bulb while changing".

Oddly enough, probably the last time so many negatives were found crammed into one sentence was a mournful grammar exercise back in fourth-form French class: "I have neither money nor friends and do not know what to do."

It was at school that my rejection of instructions originated (also of physics, square-dancing and brown serge, with no discernable ill-effect on the subsequent course of my life).

How else should a rational person respond to this direction at the top of an exam paper: "Time is short, but do not hurry." For all the use that one was, it might just as well have read: "Do not write on both sides of the paper at once."

It would ease the information overload that weighs us all down if writers of instructions would stop stating the obvious and tell us something useful, such as how to open a single-serve of milk without squirting it down your front, or a short cut to the fraction 1/2 on a computer.

But don't hold your breath (can lead to suffocation).

* Pam Wade is an Auckland writer.