Detailing The Obvious
Slaving away at work this past Saturday, snacking on a bag of Cracker Jacks, I suddenly became very thirsty. Placing iTunes on pause (thankfully silencing that damned Blue Monday cover song by Orgy), I trudged on over to the break room and purchased a carton of milk from the wheel-of-death©. On my way back to my cubicle-of-death, I noticed the following:
You’ve got to be kidding me. Does the Rock View milk company think I’m so stupid that they need to emblazon their product with detailed instructions on how to open a milk carton? What sort of invalid is incapable of figuring out the obvious way to breach the otherwise impenetrable skin of these paperboard containers?
The more I thought about it, the more insulted I felt. Next thing you know we’ll be finding signs listing in painful detail how to climb a set of stairs, bright stickers indicating how to operate a ketchup bottle, and sewn-on tags graphically displaying how to put on a pair of gloves.
Honestly, If we’re unfit enough to figure out how to open a milk carton, what makes them think we’re smart enough to know how to read, much less follow instructions?
Do these people honestly believe we’re idiots, unable to perform such a basic function in life?
It is tough when you have to design your product to be for the lowest common denominator in a ridiculously litigious society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Be glad the instructions are still in written word. Notice how many are moving to graphic symbols. Perhaps forks of the future will have a instructional representation of a person pointing to the fork then at their mouth. It will happen because someone will sue a utensil company after they jammed a fork into the wrong orifice.
Bad grammar in above post… Apologies!
Heh…the image of Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels poking himself in the eye with a fork just popped into my head.