Warranty Cards, Instruction Books and Intelligent Life in the Universe

With the beginning of March, we all begin to see the end of winter. Suddenly, the onset of spring seems real and we become eager for the days to warm and the snow to melt. Indeed, with the beginning of March, the idea of painting the house or mowing the lawn actually sounds like fun. Sure there are still several weeks of winter ahead, but the vast majority is already behind us. It is at this point in the year that I become really, really frantic.

Among the multitude of things that characterize life in a tourist area is the incredibly slow pace and general quiet that the winter months provide.

For many of us, life in the summer is incredibly hectic, made up of long hours of endless work. Survival during the summer months involves many things, but one of the most important aspects is carefully discerning what needs to be taken care immediately and what can be put off until the winter. So when tourists ask me what I do doing the winter months, I always laugh and rattle off just a few of the projects that the upcoming winter holds and then, for good measure, mention the things that I would personally like to accomplish.

After years of practice, I have become rather adept at choosing what projects can be delayed until the quiet time of the winter. Unfortunately, when the winter arrives, my list of “delayed until winter” projects seems insurmountable. Indeed, when rest and recovery time is factored in, the possibility of anyone completing my list of winter projects (let alone the things I am looking forward to working on) is virtually nonexistent.

As I said in the opening paragraph, however, March is more than anything a frantic time. Knowing that I cannot accomplish everything on my list I begin to race through as many projects as possible before time runs out. And it is this frenetic racing that led me to one of my filing cabinets.

When we moved to an apartment last June, a significant portion of our possessions relocated to a storage unit. Yes, we filled an enormous dumpster and, yes, we had a two-day yard sale, but we still had plenty of stuff that was never going to fit into our new abode.

So our plan was this: after the Holidays, Barb and I would each bring one box from storage over to the apartment and then, during the course of a week, we would sort through our respective box, tossing what wasn’t needed, reallocate things as appropriate, and re-pack/re-label the remainder. This was an excellent plan that would have resulted in clearing through 30 to 40 boxes, depending on how long winter lasted.

Up until this week, nary a box had been gone through. So, with Barb off visiting her son, Nick, in Miami for the week, I thought I would at least try to get something done and I went down the road to storage and pulled one drawer from one of my filing cabinets to begin going through.

The quickest way to make an impact on a chore of this nature is to grab the biggest file first. Once that file has been cleaned you’ll immediately see a significant difference and, I figured shrewdly, if that was the only file I got done, at least I’d be able to point to the drawer and show Barb just how much room I’d been able to make with my “hard” work.

So with my plan in place I sat down at the dining room table with a bag for recycling next to my chair and a fresh cup of coffee within reach and pulled out the file labeled “Warranties & Instructions.”

This file, of course, contained all the nonsense that comes with the items you buy. Anything that you purchase that actually does something will almost certainly contain a minimum of several loose sheets with microprint and a book of instructions that goes on for 60 pages and scares the hell out of you until you realize that the pages in English only number three and all the rest are in French, German, every Oriental dialect on the planet, and Swahili. My file folder contains every one of these loose sheets and instruction books for everything I have purchased since 1979.

Now it would be nice to say that I was able to cruise right through this file, tossing every booklet and illegible piece of paper for items long since gone from my possession directly into the recycling bag. Unfortunately, nothing entered my hands without my thoroughly perusing what it had to say. The instruction book for the toaster oven that burned up in 1990 survived a full 10 minutes in my hands before entering the bag. The warranty card for my wood-burning awl consumed another five minutes. And folks, as I read or scanned booklet after booklet I suddenly wasn’t really paying much attention to what I was looking at … I was thinking about aliens, as in creatures from outer space.

I read somewhere that to intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe, we are the aliens. This is one of the truly humbling notions I have run across and, of course, it is quite obviously true.

So as I sat with my instruction manuals and warranty cards, I began wondering what an intelligent life form from somewhere else in the universe would make of the information contained in the file folder I held in my hands.

Think about this for a moment, folks. Imagine a bunch of alien scientists huddled around my file folder. One of then reaches in and pulls out the folder that came with the aluminum stepladder I bought in 1984. They open it up and begin to look over the contents. At this point, they have no ability to understand our language, so they pay careful attention to the illustrations. In particular, they look at the pictures associated with ladder safety. Their eyes, all 15 of them, stop on the image which denotes that one should stop climbing when one reaches the top rung of the ladder.

So tell me, folks, will these aliens, looking at this instruction book, and that picture in particular, think that we are an intelligent life form?