Slashdot Mirror
Silly Product Instructions?
canfirman asks: "Not exactly a serious question, but maybe good for a laugh: Our company is bringing in new printers into the office, and I noticed that the on-screen instructions state, 'Do not pull pages until after the printer has finished its job'. I thought this would be a redundant instruction (kinda like, 'Don't run with scissors'), but it got me thinking - what are some of the dumbest instructions you have ever seen on a piece of software, hardware, or appliance?"
OH! Look!
*grabs plastic bag*
Look this is fun!
hrmm... what does this say?
Not a toy!
*falls over due to lack of oxygen*
# Please try to keep posts on topic.
# Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
# Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
It's a sticker with a picture of a hand putting a cup in the CD-ROM tray. Warning: Not intended as cup holder.
I see people ripping the pages out of laser printers before the printer has pushed it all the way out. Probly does them no end of damage but since the page is already completely pritned by the point the person has enough grip on the page to pull it all out people keep doing it :-(
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
"Don't run with scissors" is not an example of redundant instructions.
"Don't run with scissors while running", on the other hand, is.
"By clicking 'I Agree' below, you agree to the following terms..."
Seriously, does anyone read the full text of EULAs? They're a complete joke. I've heard there's a website that has a whole bunch of strange EULAs on display..
Dumb warning and instructions
--If the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.
When you open a new iPod, it has a sticker that says "Don't Steal Music."
We have one of these types of printers (HP LJ 4600DN) in my classroom, and when the kids pull pages of duplex jobs early (before they actually get spit into the finished tray), then Bad Things Happen(tm).
"Sometimes the only thing left to say is 'Oops'" -- debbers
Some interesting prescription instructions:
Inhale 1 tablet vaginally at bedtime"
And an interesting warning on a kids toy:
It can be happy and gay not good hearing if product is with mark"
One time I was borrowing a neighbor's summer home, and the guy plastered the whole place with postit notes -- one the fridge he had one that said "Put food in me," on his kids' piggy banks he wrote "Please don't steal from me" and on the damn ice tray he even double layered them -- on the top it said "Fill me" and below it said "With water." Man that got old.
"He actually wrote diddly!"
I remember seeing this one time when I was formatting a hard drive.
Keyboard Not Connected Press F1 to Continue
"Not to be used for the other use."
(On a package of nuts) "May contain nuts."
(Butcher knife)"Keep out of children."
"For indoor or outdoor use only."
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
(in troubleshooting section)
Problem: Sparks fly from commutator
Cause: Groceries in commutator.
Solution: Remove groceries from commutator.
Note all of these are from memory and may not use the same exact words. From a Radio Shack $5 headset phone: Do not use this device in a lightning storm Do not attempt to stick metal objects into this device (no joke) Do not submerge in water Do not use if your hands are wet Do not attempt to service (who would really....) May contain traces of peanuts (ok i made that last one up) Some others With cruise control (someone in the us with a motorhome didnt realise this): Warning cruise control is only intended to maintain vehicles current speed. Cruise control will not provide automatic steering control And the extra special people are idiots jumb warning message On ur macdonalds coffie .. .. .. .. ..
you guesed it
Caution Hot!
Spray paint can: "Do not spray in eyes."
Cotton Balls: "Do not insert in rectum"
Aluminum foil box: "Do not microwave"
FIRE EXTINGUISHER
On the back, oddly enough, were the following words:
Do not use near heat or open flame
This sig no verb.
"For best results, please remove cap."
Really? I was just going to bang it on the table until it exploded, then lick all the 'cheese' up!
Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing.
... I've noticed that myself and others have a different notion of when the printer's finished with the page than the printer itself.
...on a can of soda pop.
Here's a relevant journal entry about a piece of xmas chocolate i was examining while coding late one night...
packaging
DONT PANIC
My favourite is still those little preservative packets that come in shoes labelled "DO NOT EAT". I wonder if I would have a case if I choked scarfing down the laces.
"I thought it was candy"
Thing is, though, while this seems strange to not be able to take an antacid on account of an aspirin allergy, it's not so strange. Note the last four syllables in that chemical I mentioned - salycilate - and remember that aspirin is the acetate of 'salysilic acid'.
This sig no verb.
On a 50cc ATV (can't remember brand) it said 'not for use for persons under the age of 16'.
(For those who don't know, most of these things are bought for kids who are about six years old, not 16).
Oh, another at the same store. On the back of a jet ski. Near the impeller outlet (nozzle?) it said: do not stick hands inside while engine is running.
Still in the same store. Need a new battery. Most of them ship with the acid separate, in a clear bottle. With a sticker that says 'not to be taken internally'.
Go to a pool store. Look at various inflatable rings. Most of them say 'not to be used as a floatation device'.
And the ever popular warning on dessicant packs: Do Not Eat (I noticed it way before Jeff Foxworthy.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It also happened to mention that I should never mismatch the voltages for fear of letting the blue smoke out of the PS.
I would think that this sort of thing would be astoundingly obvious.
This sig no verb.
Over a decade ago, there used to be a brand of skateboarding apparrel made by World Industries called Ghetto Wear. I didn't notice till some years later after buying a pair of their pants about the washing instructions printed on the tag.
1) Pile dirty clothes on floor
2) When you run out of clean clothes, gather them up and ask your Mom how to use the washer
3) When she says she'll do it so you don't break her washer and ruin your clothes, come back in an hour and they'll be done.
I also had a FUCT jacket that's washing instructions were:
Washing Instructions: Steal this garment.
I like that kind of thing, making the blatently obvious and unnessary become fun.
WARNING: Don't hit toward human, or the things which are easy to be broken."
"You want to see tigers? Come to Kenya."
"all your base are belong to us"
:)
quite the warning label.
I once had a desk I was building where the instrunctions said something to the effect of: put piece A underneath B and piece C overneath.
I found that slightly amusing.
My friend had a candle sitting on the table at his house a few years ago that had a sticker on the bottom which read, and I shit you not, "To extinguish, blow out."
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
"Do not use for the other thing."
I'm not kidding.
My
Limekiller
Does some great stuff with their lables. I have one of their t-shirts which includes "wash cold, dry low, use no bleach or chemical weapons, question authority" and "100% cotton mouth, made in the united states of the eu."
Cue The Sun...
Engrish
'does linux have a lowet tco'
Personally. i'm apalled that slashdot is running ads like these after all the hundreds of articles that have appeared on the pages stating the opposite.
I know they have to make money through advertising bu they can, and should, refuse to carry ads like these.
Would an anti-abortion website carry a banner ad for the nearest abortion clinic - I don't think so. Slashdot should not be carry pro-microsoft advertising.
Your printer has a duplexing function where the paper is ejected, paused, and rolled back in. These messages are there for a reason.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
There's a wealth of silly instructions here.
Okay so you eat some and get back to us on how it went. If we don't hear from you we'll assume it went badly.
And, since "Don't run with scissors" isn't a redundant statement, I'd say they were correct in their having to warn you. Are you in india?
Rank Presidents by th
..."Getting ready to install Windows for the *first* time..."
yeah right.
We've just received a new birdbath for our garden. Believe it or not, it comes with operating instructions, including "Always hold the birdbath horizontally when filling it with water."
Do you think that the manufacturers had support calls along the lines of
Caller: No matter how much water I pour into the birdbath, it won't fill up.
Support engineer (or whatever birdbath support function is called): Have you tried ensuring that it's horizontal so the water doesn't flow out?
You can rent this space for $5 a week.
do not reuse....
its on every condom....
--meh--
has killed several programmers, is /. sigs are to be beleived.
However a personal favourite of mine is on an old can of chocolate drink powder, the recipe for making it up includes the follwing instruction:
Add 2 heaped tablesppons of milk.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Do not expose Apple Laserwriter to open flame.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
WARNING: Do not shoot your bow straight up.
(Kip, remember that?)
Not realy an instruction but a lot of OEM microsoft products used to have a seal over the CD box which needed to be broken to open the case, the seal said somthing along the lines of 'breaking this seal shows that you have agreed to the licencing conditions contained within' Also unplug your keyboard and see what the message says. Odds are it says no keyboard or keyboard error, press f1 to continue.
Once I bought a medecine _against pain_. The name was "Spidifen". The VERY long list of side effects contained: Gastro-intestinal pain, hemoragie (internal bleeding) and HEADACHE!! Actually the side effects list was so long, I never took a single pill.
First I wanted to be a chef. Then I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow ever since.
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."
I bought some nail polish a few years ago that was labeled "for external use only." More recently I bought a plastic tablecloth that warned "do not iron."
For great justice.
I always read that as:
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated +5
Dumbest warnings I ever saw were on a laptop's power supply:
And no, I'm not making this up.Of course, there's no word on whether the lead in the power cord is transmuted to gold when I cross the border into Nevada, or whether or not residents of other states need to wash their hands after plugging things in or not.
(The background is that a bunch of twits fell for the junk science on PVC softened with lead phthalates. Consider that if studies on intravenous bags with the stuff are questionable, it's Not Bloody Likely that failing to wash your hands after you plug in your laptop is going to kill you. But since when did science matter to the granola-crunchin' hypesters of the People's Republic of California? It's to protect the chilllllldren and the enviiiiiiirunmennnnnt!
Translations can be an endless source of involuntary humor. The best example I can recall is a power key on a computer, whose label was translated in Italian as "potere". :)
According to that label, the humble key is something that, if pressed, will give you the kind of "power" that a dictator have...!
Water jet may cause severe injury or death. Avoid directing water jet towards any oriface...
The label then proceeded to list specific bodily orifices towards which the wather jet should not be directed.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
At the grocery store I recently found a package of Taramisiu and it said DO NOT TURN UPSIDE DOWN, on the bottom (bit late isn't it?).
Somebody hacked the Ninnle homepage and left that message.
We have a HP4600Dn which Duplexes and it's smart enough to tell people on it's LCD that they should not try to pull the paper. It's pretty smart.....I've seen many people trying to grab paper coming out of that thing
On a side note, the new printers and photocopiers are pretty smart...they help you to fix them....
Gujju
Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness
I personally like the first step in almost any software install via instructions printed on the cdrom package: "1. Insert into cdrom."
./what?
on a packet of British Midland mixed nuts.
I am still trying to figure out my mouthwash... Got a little tiny bottle of scope at 7-11. Instructions say to swish 1 oz in mouth for min (or however they worded it) They dont mention what to do with the other 1/2 oz that came in the bottle..... Yup, they say to use 1 oz so they sell you a 1.5oz bottle ?!?
(Written on a toy Superman cape) Warning: This product does not enable the user to fly.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
On a hair blow dryer. A little research found that a company was sued when a guy used his hair dryer to keep himself warm by turning it on and throwing it in his blankets. He fell asleep and became crispy after the fire that started. Amazing, the moron won.
I say warnings like this should be omitted on purpose so that people without this common sense are weeded out of the gene pool.
One of my favorites is on the bottom of every keyboard these days:
:gninraW"
".yrujni suoires esuac yam draobyek yna fo esu taht eveileb strepxe emoS
Sorry about that - to see the message while I copied it I had to type with the keyboard upside down...
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Also cautioned to make sure that there's adequate clearance between the pan and the micorwave sides.
It's the same with microwaving a floppy disk - put it on a glass so that the metal part isn't near anything conductive, and you can nuke it fine :-)
I pulled a label off a shirt that was bugging me. After the usual washing instructions it said "do not fry shirt".
I was just installing a Connection Utility for the onboard 3Com controller on my ASUS A7V600 mobo, and it gave me an error indicating that certain dependencies needed to be satisfied before I could install the utility. For more information on what software I needed, I was referred to a web page.
Let's say that again. To get more information on what I need to to before I can install the Connection Utility, I was referred to a web page.
Seems a lot like the old "Keyboard error: press F1 to continue." or whatever.
Your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device.
Nobody has ever survived an attempted jetliner ditching using a flotation device, or otherwise. If you did, hypothermia would likely get to you before the Coast Gurd.
Place the oxygen mask over your nose and mouth and breathe normally.
And while you are doing this, the pilot is in a power dive towards 10,000 feet where there is enough air pressure to breathe. But he didn't tell you this: you think the plane is crashing instead of performing an intentional dive, and you are going to die. But breathe normally.
"Do not use if printed seal is missing or broken."
Right, i'll just chew a hole in the bottom of the packet to get my migraine medicine out.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
That's not really silly or stupid. Why? Because many people may not have used printers before. I've seen people yank the pages out when they're in a rush, and at college in a CS lab people would do just that.
It would be silly if it said something like: ...
:)
"Don't insert parrot into paper tray without defeathering".
Or
"Don't use on beach without drinking a Corona first"
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
"Remove baby before folding for storage."
on a cup of something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea
"Not to be used as a flotation device."
Among other things i can't remember.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I wanted to see what it tasted like. I ate some. 41 years later, no cancer yet.
"Do not taunt happy-fun ball."
Words to live by, kids.
given this...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
In the UK, prescription sedatives used to have the warning 'May cause drowsiness'. This has now been changed to 'Causes drowsiness'.
In a similar vein, some children's medicine still states 'May cause drowsiness. If affected, do not drive or operate heavy machinery'.
Just to put your mind at rest;
Asbestos is perfectly safe when in a solid form, its only when it breaks down to fibers that you have a problem. By ingesting a paste, you would likely have passed the whole lot by the next day.
It's still not stealing.
And copying entire songs is only illegal if the applicable laws say so.
I'm not sure how things are in the Land of the Free and the Home of the DMCA, but in my country it's not illegal if you copy it for private or domestic use. In NZ they're thinking of making it legal if you're copying it for your own use, amidst protests by the corporates.
"It's taking away people's rights to earn a living, and that's horrendous," Sony NZ managing director Michael Glading is quoted as saying.
Let's cut the BS: If I make a copy the owners of the original copy still have FULL ACCESS to the original. So it's unlike stealing which deprives the owners of access.
In contrast: The corporates have lobbyed (successfully in many countries) to remove and reduce the public's access to copyrighted material AND copyrighted material that would have entered PUBLIC DOMAIN.
Now you tell me who are the real thieves? Who are the real thieves?
Don't be deceived by the lies - the brainwashing and bullshit terms like "Intellectual Property" and "Piracy".
for the best of instructions try here
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Our company is bringing in new printers into the office, and I noticed that the on-screen instructions state, 'Do not pull pages until after the printer has finished its job'. I thought this would be a redundant instruction (kinda like, 'Don't run with scissors')
.. without fail .. one of the wunderkids would have pulled the paper out without waiting, which on those models, done often enough, would tear out the cogs.
You'd think so. Years back I supported a group of Engineers at Compaq - they had a pair of Typhoon 20 printers. Nearly once a month
We had a stock of new cogs (bought locally) and learned to fix the problem, of course.
Display some adaptability.
You can read many funny warning (product) labels if you google for it
The first result, Things People Said: Warning Labels has lots of them, and they are funny :)
I don't know if they are all true, but they do make for some amusing reading.
Recently I took a Lotus Notes certification (if you don't know, Notes is a database/mail application used by many large corporations). Some days later, I received the official certification documents in a big white envelope.
;-)
Now, across the flap of the envelope were the words "by breaking this seal you agree to the terms of the license agreement found within this envelope". Within. Yep.
Being a resourceful chap, I decided to cut up the side of the envelope, and indeed finding the promised license agreement along with my certification certificate.
I have emailed the person who signed the attached document entitled "Welcome to the Notes Professional family" (oooh how cosy), suggesting this is an odd situation to put new "family members" in. Apparently, however, her maternal feelings were not strong enough to compel her to reply.
Good thing I didn't break that seal!
"Good news, everyone!"
That ruins my fun. I just got another box that didn't
have that label though.
It's what the little sticker on my daughter's toy cd player says. My first reaction was they missed the "W" but it's the "ON" button upside down.
Made in China.
"Place on ground, light fuse, get away."
don't tell me I'm the first:
www.dumbwarnings.com
I searched quicklz an there was no mention
of the dumb* sites.
This post cannot be rebroadcast without the express written constent of Major League Baseball.
Instructions for the care and feeding of a Chinese SKS rifle: "Do not let your SKS get tainted with defilement or sunburnt."
Embossed on the front of anti-personnel mines: "This side toward enemy."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Chainsaw warning - "Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals." "Emergency! Everybody to get from street!" -- Russian Sailor Warning
We have a saying amongst my friends... if you see it written down, it's because some idiot did it at least once.
My favorites was on a government health and safety page. It basically said to reports all work injuries using this web form... unless somebody had been killed, then you should not use the web form, you should call 911 instead. Wish I could find that page again.
Also funny is instructions on our shower head: "Do not aim shower head at sensitive parts of your body... such as your eyes or ears"... riiiiiight...
--D
It's not exactly office equipment, but I've seen more than one automotive sunshade with the instructions, "Remove shade before operating vehicle."
There are of course just so many finite chords out there.
... of bad installation instructions and warnings is this. End of story.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
"[Do not] dangle the mouse by the cord or throw it at coworkers."
The SGI Indy manual
"Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."
Apple's LaserWriter manual
there's enough for everybody, let's share it