When I got to the top after a 1300' climb of 4.5 miles, we happened to run into a scout troop who was, of course, unencumbered by such ridiculous loads. It's interesting to try and come up with a good reason why you're carrying a load of manuals up a mountain (the one I tried using was that I wanted to learn Linux in the solitude of the wilderness.) In reality, my purpose in doing this was not to have people think me crazy (that would be quite redundant) but as a training exercise for a planned trip to climb Mount Rainier this summer, one of the many activities I have found in this "reality" stuff. It never ceases to amaze me how lifelike the developers of reality made it. In fact I would almost swear that it's the real thing... There are still a few bugs in it (but here, they're more often called "insects" rather than "undocumented features",) so I will pass judgment on this subject for a while longer.
There has to be some purpose a lot more fulfilling and useful for these things (the same can be said about computers, but that's what the last 40 columns have been about for the most part.) What I did this weekend sure as heck wasn't it, though. Someone out there should probably let me know know what I should really be using these things for (and anyone who includes the letters "RTFM" anywhere in their response will pe promptly and severely LARTed. I have determined that they are an excellent source of dead weight in many cases (depending on what programs they're for. The manual for Win95 (if you can even call it that) might, however, does not qualify for this category. I have also determined that plenty of them are apparently beyond the conprehension level of the average user (a government subsidized program of socialized Hooked on Phonics may be sufficient to solve this problem, however.)
I am quite sure that all of us have ended up with a rather significant number of manuals over the years of picking up all of the latest versions of your software every two weeks or so. Sure, at first you might be able to keep the little buggers in order, But what about that one product that comes wityh ten billion pages of documentation, all of which has to be read before you can be within a hundred meters of the product without causing a nuclear explosion in some third world country? A thousand pages here, a thousand pages there, and before you know it, these things are taking up a ridiculous amount of space! Not to mention all of the other books you will have to buy in order to actually know how to use the sucker (apparently, the million pages of documentation were all written in Serbo-Croatian or something like that.) The stack of software manuals could get to be monstrous... and this is just for the "user friendly" stuff out there! These days, a lot of companies replace printed documentation with a CD-ROM containing the text
Another chronic offender in this regard is software boxes. In here, there are some boxes that date back to the early Triassic period. For some strange reason, it seems like nobody ever throws the things away. Right now, I can find at least 3 different boxes for programs that haven't been used in well over a year (including a copy of Lotus SmartSuite dating back to just about the time when there were actually some decent programs in it. The only problem is that certain people in this house haven't figured out how to use anything else, so these programs, originally built to run in Windows 3.0(!) still find a place on the computers in here.) The reasoning behind this is unknown. Maybe people think that they can return the programs for a refund when they become obsolete. Perhaps they want to make it look like they actually use their computer for something, notwithstanding the fact that most of these programs were deleted months ago. Maybe these things are just there to fill up whatever bookshelf space isn't being filled by manuals and the like. In the den, I could just as easily do that with defective or obsolete computer junk (which is in fact partially used here) but that would probably ruin whatever tenuous semblance of any decor in this place. Either that, or it would camoflage the shelf enough that I would never be able to find it again.
Maybe the idea of clearing out these things and regaining a few valuable bookshelves sounds like a good idea to some. There is the solution of just boxing up the things and leaving them to rot in some corner of the garage somewhere, but as soon as you close the boxes, you've opened a new can of worms without even realizing it. As I have said before, nature abhors a vacuum, but what the vacuum is usually filled with is not much better than the vacuum itself. This means that before you can find something more appropriate to fill the shelves with, the manuals, books and boxes will be back with a vengance. The forsaken books in the back of the garage have made a call to their bretheren, who have suddenly now appeared on the shelf. Gradually, in the harsh environment of the garage, the books begin to disappear one by one into oblivion. One of these books happens to be the one that contains the product ID that you need to reinstall that $8000 software you messed up (an occurrence that probably would have happened if you had read the manual in the first place.) It's a vicious cycle.
In a very informal survey taken among the denizens of PointWorld, I asked each person there at the time (all 3 of them) how much shelf space was taken up by manuals. The answer I got was "Does floor space count?" (n the contingency that the floor was actually even there. Scientific tests are being run to determine this as you read this column.) Everyone else just told me to RTFM, so of course they were all LARTed (just a reminder for those of you who were far too impatient to bother with actually reading the first half of this column.) Even with this little bit of information, I have determined that manual overload is quite possibly an issue that affects the world as a whole. The den, long a favorite hangout spot of a whole lot of gravity, is constantly on the verge of gravity collapse , rendering the whole room nothing more than a black hole (I think one is already forming in the printer somewhere, explaining it's recent problems with jobs going into the middle of nowhere) but if there is a widespread incidence of manual overload (MO for short, even if the acronym is already used) the possibility of thousands of miniscule black holes appearing throughout the computer rooms of the world could mean disastrous results for the planet. Therefore, I feel that some scientific research is necessary in order to make sure this will never happen (even if it's nothing more than an excuse to tell a whole bunch of geeky guys in lab coats to RTFM.)