Poor Documentation Can Sabotage Use of Otherwise Good Products

A picture is not always worth a thousand words. Maybe some people find pictures or videos helpful, but we don’t. We deplore instructions that don’t have enough clear text to permit us to install and use a product. As an example, we purchased a bike light as a safety measure, because a lot of motorists simply don’t see the cyclists because they aren’t as large as cars. But the bike light is still sitting around because the pictures are worse than nothing. Perhaps the problem is that the pictures are created by “right-brained” artists and we are a “left-brained” engineer type. We also suspect that some manufacturers of products they sell to customers in different countries want to economize on packaging and/or instruction sheets that otherwise would need to be printed in multiple languages.

Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector Battery Changing Can Drive You to Drink!

Unfortunately, every homeowner is required by law to have working smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. We wonder how many actually change the batteries regularly. We sympathize with the ones who don’t, because (a) they are on the ceiling (or up high on the wall) so you have to climb onto a ladder or stool and stand perilously, (b) even the best-organized homeowner is likely to have a mixture of makes and models of these detectors so the ladder-climber may have to guess whether the detector is removed and replaced by turning clockwise or counter-clockwise, and (c) when s/he tests the detector the sound is deafening.