There is this minor annoyance in my life that has been going on for as long as I can remember. It’s not something that I think can be easily changed, nor is it something that I can really do anything about. Trust me, I’ve tried and decided that changing this behavior would be akin to stopping the tides. Now, when I say it is a minor annoyance, I mean that it only crops up to bite me in the ass every once in a blue moon. Last night just happened to be latest syzygy of this rare phenomenon.
I bet you are curious? What could this minor annoyance be?
This first time I recognized this pathological behavior was when I was a teenager. My mother happened to be an avid collector of kitchen gadgets. You could say she was a bottomless pit of kitchen gadgets. They’d fall in, never to be seen again. That’s another story. The behavior I’m talking about is only tangentially related to the coveting of time saving kitchen ware. I can remember the gadget being hauled out of the box by my mother and the anticipation of its use a palpable feeling. But first, the required reading of the instruction manual. Only, my mother never bothered. Too Boring, too slow. Why wait? This would often times lead to the gadget in question doing things that were inexplicable to my mother. At the time I wrote this off as something only my mother and other women in my family seemed to do. Oh how wrong I was.
More often than not the standard operating procedure is to discard the manual and jump right in. The LTR does this all the time. When we first met, she had no set schedule for servicing her car. She’d only take it in for more than a regular oil change if she was headed out on a cross country road trip. When I asked her if she had ever looked at her owner’s manual for a maintenance schedule, she gave me an inquisitive look and asked if that information was in the manual.
Computers, DVD players, DVRs, cameras, software, the list could go on forever. If there’s an instruction manual for something we own, I’ve read it she hasn’t. Early on in our relationship, she’d ask me how to do something, and I’d show her. The minor annoyance started when I’d get asked how to do something more than once. This would be exacerbated by the fact that she’d claim I was showing her ‘too fast’ and she didn’t catch it all. So then I’d dumb it down and slow it down so she could follow what I was doing. That’s when I’d hear the complaint that either she ‘already knows that’ or ‘you’re being condescending.’ Yep, I am.
The minor annoyance still persists, but my standard response has changed. When the LTR (or for that matter, any woman I know) asks me how to do something, I ask, ‘Have you read the manual?’ which is typically followed by ‘No.’ That’s when I tell her, ‘Well, why don’t you pull it out. I’m sure the answer is in there.’ At this point she will either, (rarely) pull out the manual, or (more often) try to figure out the solution to her problem.
