Inscrutable Instructions

inscrutable instructions

Like many middle-class Americans, I have a second refrigerator in my garage. Due to some minor change in configuration, the freezer door had spontaneously popped open a few times. I wanted to prevent this, so I bought a child-proof latch to hold the refrigerator’s freezer door shut.

The instructions were very poorly written, as you can see from Step 3, depicted above. I find this mysterious directive specially humorous. It combines the corporate tendency towards too much generality (everything is a “product”, from toothpaste, to cars, to mortgages) with inept translation. Someone even went to extra effort to help the user, as the red text about The Effect shows.