Choices

Choices

“It still doesn’t work.”

“We must have something hooked up wrong. Let’s go over the instructions one more time and check,” Eric said.

Frank rolled his eyes, “Again? You just love this don’t you!”

“It’ll only take a couple of minutes. We’ll just check each direction and see if we did it right.”

“Fine... Number One: Attach Card A to Card B with the #6 screws....”

On they went checking each instruction until they got to number sixteen.

“And there it is!” Eric said, as if he had found a pile of gold. “The red wire, is in the blue spot! The instructions are confusing. I would have worded them differently.”

“Great, just fix it!”

Eric looked at Frank and frowned a bit. “Don’t you want to know how it should have been worded?”

“No. I just want to get this finished and working! The whole point is to get it working.”

“Well I think the whole point is to word instructions so that anyone can read them, and no matter who they are they will still know what to do.”

“Yeah, I can understand that, but who cares. It’s not like we’re going to be explaining instructions to people. We just have to understand these instructions. Thank goodness you did.”

They finished the project and Frank was happy. Eric not. Eric never let go of the idea that instructions should be written so they could be read by anybody, and still be understood.

Years later, Eric was winning awards for his instructions booklets, because they were so clear and easy to follow! He was very proud of his work, still relatively poor, but very happy and satisfied with his life.

Frank, on the other hand, went into the junk removal business. He actually became a multimillionaire quite young.