Sometimes The Poetry Is Created In The Translation

Directions, instructions, the owner’s manual, call them whatever you want to call them, just like the Bible, they weren’t written in English. At least that’s the way it is with the crap we buy. Our brand new washer and dryer arrived yesterday, and I’m going to quote some of the troubleshooting bullet points.

· The half of laundry (8lbs) water usage is about 18 liter.
· The water usage is about 50 liter until from washing to 2 rinsing.
· When washing big bulky items that occur noise/vibration or damaged laundry.
· The blanket must put below 3.5 kg and one sheet in washing machine.
· Rugs can bring unbalance and cannot be used.

Um, okay. I guess I should be happy that they tried, if by trying I mean writing some stuff in Japanese and then copying and pasting it into Google translate. I doubt they could decipher the Roman alphabet after the translation so they went with whatever the Japanese equivalent of f**k it is and hit print. That’s what I would have done if the roles were reversed. Google changes alphabets when necessary, which is cool if proofreading isn’t important. They’re still better than IKEA, who feel a picture is worth 1000 words and 1000 words are all you need to build a working space shuttle. I don’t even thing IKEA furniture comes with their picture directions anymore. I think they make you print them off the internet. The guy who delivered the new appliances was not interested in hanging around. We were at a bit of an impasse about how to get the old washer out to make room for the new. Grammy and I broke out slide rules and graphing calculators. The guy from Sears’s first idea – and the one we went with – was take the door off the hinges. That is something I wish I had thought of fifteen years ago. Bold and simple gets stuff done. I think that’s Ockham’s razor. Unfortunately, the gas hasn’t been turned on and the tumbler in the washer is locked tight so it won’t break when it’s moved, so we have two perfectly good washers and two perfectly good dryers, yet we’re probably going to the Laundromat tomorrow for the first time in almost twenty years. Irony.