Being senior offgers advantages, and like everything else, a few drawbacks. Amazingly technology has shown us great tools, but by the time we can really afford them, some of us are so old we can't remember how to use them, if we haven't for more than 10 minutes, or where we put the manual. I've hunted for an instruction book for hours only to eventually remember that what-ever-it-is didn't come with one. You are supposed to get your help needs online. Finding a printed manual takes less time than trying to find online instructions. After I go through their time saving short cuts of irrelevant-to-me FAQs it occurs to me that I still might remember what it was I was not understanding. It is always depressing to me that I never seem to be in step with the majority; when not even the FAQ list has my question in it.
The CPU running my brain has slowed down. I carry the simplest cell phone someone else's money can buy (a loving Xmas gift to me for a year). I have two digital cameras (one a point and shoot, sort of) so I don't need a camera phone. It is rare for me to make or receive calls on my cell, actually. Thus, I can't retain the instructions on how to retrieve voice mail from one phone to the other as they get upgraded just as I'm beginning to master the one I have. That might be remedied if I gave people my number and turned it on, might it not?
Having forgotten my phone on for a day or more, when I picked it up it indicated I had missed a call. My last phone had a password to retrieve voice mail and I vaguely remember not ever having completely mastered it before I found myself with a new phone. About every 10 or 20 years I go through the folder (s) of instruction manuals I throw into a drawer when I get something knew. Though the admonition to "RFM, Mom" rings in my ears, I regret to say that even if I read it, I retain none of the instructions until I have repeated the steps often enough to have them embedded into my cerebral cortex.
Years ago we spoke of computers as 'intuitive'. If someone said that today, people would ask what they meant. My American mind does not work in tune with the Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, etc. mind that built the latest torture device. Power ON buttons are unmarked and hidden; LED light are on when the unit is off and vice versa; all buttons work in the reverse of the last version you owned which took years to master. Tonight my struggle is my inability to find the speaker phone on my cell. When I have wanted a private conversation, the poltergeists who inhabit the phone have turned it off. Since there are no instructions I could locate on turning it off, it stayed on until the poltergeists decided they had embarrassed me long enough. Now that it is off and I want it on, it can't be done....at least by me.
I'm looking for an instruction book that is written the way my head understands things. Is that too much to ask? Lastly, I want some standardization of appliances. It would be nice if I could go to someone's house as a guest and not have to grovel (in order to heat up water for tea)for instructions to their microwave.
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