Instruction Manuals Have a Purpose

So today I learned a valuable lesson…do not come home just before dinner with a brand new 20” HDTV in the back seat of your car. Sure as shootin’ your husband or boyfriend will insist on setting it up right away because it will only take “just a couple of minutes.” Three hours later, you’re now pouring through a stack of instruction manuals (which your male counterpart refused to do at the start) for the new TV, the old DVD player and the even older VCR, desperately trying to find the secret for getting the TV signal to mesh with the DVD player, the audio to actually work when the DVD player is playing and the VCR to work with the TV. In all fairness, my husband did hook up all the components correctly. What he didn't count on was that hooking up the components in the new digital mode required changing the setups of the older equipment. Now I know “real techies” do not read manuals but, when you’re about to faint from hunger because you’ve missed your dinnertime, there is nothing wrong with admitting defeat and reading the instructions. Sure enough, I managed to find the answers to all our problems (that’s why I spent 26 years as a librarian) and I am now blissfully watching our new TV in our den while I eat my less than satisfying microwaved rice bowl which I dragged out of the freezer. And will my husband learn from this experience and at least glance at the instruction manual when we buy our new ginormous flat screen TV for the living room sometime in the near future? Hah!