THE MANUALS WE IGNORE

Hello everyone, welcome to my blog once more. When I came across this prompt I could not help but laugh, I had to start recalling if I ever read the manual of my phone. Let's be real, I have never read its manual, and I'm pretty sure most people haven't either.

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I can still remember vividly what happened the day I got my phone, it was actually a gift from my father and it was a surprised though. That day was the last day of my WASSCE [West African Secondary School Certificate Examination].

I had been anticipating a new phone for quite a long time, while I was in secondary school my dad bought me a phone and it slipped off from my hand and that was how my old phone got spoilt, my dad promised to buy a new one for me only with a condition that I have to focus on my examination first and I had to put in all effort in my exams.

That fateful day, after the joy of writing my last exams, I celebrated with my friends and when I got home my dad returned from work and surprised me with what he promised, I screamed for joy. I immediately went through the phone pack, I tore it open turn on the phone. I did not even bother going through the readers manual, my joy knew no bounds that all I wanted at the moment was to just explore my new phone.

I carefully took out the phone and kept the pack in my drawer, after all who cares about the phone manual when everything you want is right inside the phone. The joy of owning something new alone would not let you see the importance of reading the phone manual until you get confused at some point.

Even though I didn't read the manual, something happened one day that made me go through it. I had used my phone for months without knowing where and how to take a screenshot. I had wanted to screenshot something on my phone, but I couldn't do it like I did on my old phone, where I would directly use the power button and the volume button.

I went through my phone settings and YouTube videos, I still could not figure it out, that was when I remembered that there was a manual I failed to read. I immediately went through my phone pack and read through the manual till I found out how to go about it, it was a big relief that the manual gave me a solution but to be very frank I never read the manual till the end, as soon as I saw what I wanted, I flipped through the other pages, close the manual and put it back into the pack.

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I also had some other experience, when I bought a new casio scientific calculator all I knew was to add, divide, and do simple arithmetic, I never knew I could do logarithm and even calculus with the calculator not until my friends in school told me about it. I had to go back and and read through the manual carefully for the first time, that was when I finally understood the importance of reading a manual.

I don't think I'm alone in admitting that I've never read a manual cover to cover. I've skimmed through a few, glanced at diagrams, and maybe even watched a YouTube tutorial just to figure out how to use a new gadget. But, thorough manual-reading? Nope, not my style.

And let's be honest, with most devices nowadays it's often easy to just wing it and figure things out as we go along, but the truth is the readers manual is way more easier to understand and master the device's full capabilities, it contains safety precautions, which can save time and frustration in the long run. Let's learn the better way.

Thank you all for reading!!

Posted Using INLEO