Beech Tree News Network

I think I’ve told you before, my husband Garey is a big fan of instructions.  It matters little to him that I am not.  He’s always stopping me in the middle of some project I’m doing in order to read the instructions to me.  Second only to his love of instructions, is his affinity for warnings.  I bet I’ve heard, “Do not sit or stand on the glass shelf, top rung of the ladder or handle bars of a moving ATV or the like” at least a hundred times; as well as, “Do not over-fill, over-tighten or over-heat.”  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve done most of those things, and yes, with near-peril to myself and those nearby, but we’re all still in the land of the living, so I say, no harm—no foul.
    Our granddaughter, Sabria, has noticed the attention her PaPa pays to those little pieces of paper that come inside new boxes, so she has started to mimic his behavior.  Anytime, she or I open a new toy, she always says, “Let’s read the unstructions, Gee.”  She unfolds the instructions, spreads them out on the kitchen table and pretends to read.  “It says to do this,” she says, as she looks at the progression of pictures.  She gets pretty close to being able to get the thing together by looking at those pictures.  I, like Sabria, believe a picture is worth a thousand words, so when I put something together, I usually go by the pictured unstructions myself. 
    Garey is usually a very patient person.  He has learned to be because he works on his own farm equipment, and before that, he worked on his mining equipment.  It has always puzzled me that putting children’s toys together could cause him so much frustration.  I figured this out early in our marriage, so I was the one up late on Christmas Eve putting together doll buggies, pizza shooters and Barbie town houses. It was easier to just do it myself than to deal with his anxiety over small pieces of plastic.
    This Christmas, I finally figured out what it was that had caused Garey so much stress all those years ago.  It was while I was trying to read the instructions to the Barbie Dream House.  Santa dropped it off at our house because there wasn’t enough space for it in Sabria’s room at her house.  The Dream House was a big project, so I decided I’d scan the instructions before I moved on to the pictures, just in case there were any special tools I might need, like my tool of choice, the rubber mallet.
    I’m not sure where they find the people who write instructions for the assembly of children’s toys, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same people who write the math problems on the ACT or maybe even a few of the guys who put together the IRS income tax form.  They are both equally confusing.  As I read, I began to feel very sorry for my husband.  He had really tried to go by these kinds of muddled-up instructions all those years ago, each time he attempted to put together one of our girl’s Christmas toys.  No wonder he became frustrated.  He showed more restraint than I would have, especially if my rubber mallet was lying nearby.
    I decided to ditch the instructions and go by the tried-and-true picture method.  Everything snapped right into place, and I was finished by ten pm, which leads me to the conclusion that there are times when you need to ignore instructions and trust your own abilities and instincts; although, I do ascribe to the wisdom of not sitting or standing on the Barbie Dream House.