#50 Some Ass. Required

I recently purchased a new mp3 player for my wife. Her old one had mysteriously fried-out 2 days past its un-extended warranty period and would no longer receive information from our computer. That’s happened before. We figured we needed to get a firmware upgrade. For those of you who, like me, had never heard of a firmware upgrade, it’s simple. You go out online and log on to a gizmo manufacturer’s website and they send an electronic packet of gobblydegoop to whatever it is you’ve got connected to your computer by a USB cable. Basically, that means you can broadband-up a little data sweatshop in Kaybop-akar India and they’ll reprogram your device all the way across the world. Great theory, except this time it didn’t work. I suspected—after three or six hours of time wasting—that the source of the difficulty was not my device, but Windows XP Service Pack 2. Probably the manufacturer of my product and Bill Gates had yet to work out a licensing agreement and so our two devices could no longer communicate. For some reason the prophetic phrase, “What’s the frequency Kenneth?” immediately popped into my mind.
Call me old-fashioned but even though computers aspire to be as ordinary as a home appliance, I don’t remember ever having to go out and by a new toaster because the bread didn’t fit anymore.
So anyhow, that’s just what I do. I go out and buy a new version of the mp3 player and guess what? It’s incompatible as well. Service Pack 2, although I’m sure it’s very good at communicating to the government any terrorist conspiracy inklings I may have lurking in my computer, is pretty sucky when it comes to interacting with my handheld devices.
But here’s the deal. It took me too damn long to figure this out. Why? Because the dang manufacturer didn’t have a fricking instruction manual with the device. The only thing they had even resembling instructions was this two-page international picture booklet that as near as I could figure told me to put in the CD that came with the package and then go from there. “From there” ended up being a defective CD. I finally managed to open up the instruction manual file on the CD and then print out a 36-page document, which didn’t help anyhow. I now know in intricate detail how to upload a song into the music management program and download it onto my player. Unfortunately, I couldn’t install the music management program, and my computer won’t load the drivers necessary to recognize the player. But what really yanks my cord is that I now have 36 pages of wasted paper sitting on my desk. From where came the notion that when you buy a product, you can’t even include a set of instructions—the jump from “some assembly required” to “some printing required before the assembly could even begin?”
I tell you this, if the next time I buy a toaster, I have to get online first to figure out how to program it to make my toast light, medium, or dark it’s gonna make me really, really cranky.
America Ya Gotta Love It.