Friday, October 06, 2006

Documentation

So, I seem to have left my laptop power adapter at the client yesterday. No big, I can just get a new one from our IT guys, as I am working in my own office today (a shocking change, I realize). So 5 seconds of conversation gets me a new power adapter, wonderfully boxed and packaged with lots of Chinese labeling (it is a Lenovo, after all). I'm not sure that I needed to know that my new adapter was tested and packed in the Futian Free Trade Zone Branch of International Information Products (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., but there you go.

The thing I found most interesting, though, was the User's Guide. Come on, people, it's a power adapter. You plug the two-prong end into the wall and the one-prong end into your computer. Do I really need a 49 page (literally) user guide for a power adapter? No, I do not. To be fair, the user guide is in just about every language in the EU, as well as Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and something else I don't recognize, but it's a power adapter. The half-page visual instructions on p. 3 were plenty fine all on their own. I honestly have to wonder why they would actually print that large user manual for a power adapter. It seems like a waste to me, but maybe it is possible their customers are so ignorant they can't plug something in without help.

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