Stupid Directions

Yesterday at work I was installing bank software for my Finance Officer. She is the ONLY person in my district who utilizes this software, and as a result, I'm not all that familiar with it. So I had to do what I usually don't have to do with software, and that is to read the directions. And these directions really bugged me.

Here's why: Step one of the directions was fairly straightforward, to back up the old database, and I did this very quickly. Step two was to create a folder for the new database. Again, I did it without difficulty. When I got to step three, "Uninstalling the Old Application," though, I was thrown by these directions: "WARNING: Prior to uninstalling the old application, please complete Step Four, 'Downloading the new application.' Then return to this step."

I was immediately struck by a better idea--why didn't the technical writer who created those directions simply revise them to reverse the order of Steps Three and Four?  After all, if you have to do step four BEFORE step three, then it's not really step four, is it?

What amazed me is that the warning wasn't hand written or anything like that. Someone had opened up an electronic version of the document and revised it to add the warning to do step four before step three, but never did it occur to this person to simply skip the warning and reverse the directions. Brilliant!

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though. The Step Four directions, which I dutifully did before going on to Step Three, guided me to download a new version of the software. And written in the directions was this: "This is a large file, which may take as long as 2 hours to download." That's a completely useless statement that gave me no idea of the size of the file. I started the download and as I watched the size of the file grow, I had NO idea whether it was going to be a 5 MB file or a 3,000 MB file (In the end, it was 175 MB and took maybe 4 minutes to download). I just stood there twiddling my thumbs while my Finance Officer asked, "How long is this going to take?" and I had to answer truthfully, "I have no idea."

I only hope that the software works better than the directions!