Get the picture?

Yesterday, I had to get a new printer/scanner/copier/toaster/deep fryer for the computer. I think I told you this: Windows Vista is all snobbish and everything, and regarded my 2002-model scanner and printer as being relics of the Pleistocene era, if not earlier.

So we got a new one - birthday gift from Peggy to me - and I go to hook it up and what do I find in place of written, clear, step-by-step instructions? The deadliest form of information to me: the pictograph.

You know what? I think that if all Adam had to go on was a pictograph, you and I never would have been born. I for one need words!

Take fig. "A" here: this is an instruction sheet - an thumbnail sketch, if you will, from IKEA, showing how a man can upturn a bar stool and trim his thumbnail, using a screwdriver. Or, it's showing how to loosen the seat part so that the noisy guy from his office will take a laughable pratfall at the next office happy hour at O'Herlihy's Ye Olde Ale House, which will be followed by a sternly-worded memo from the big boss on the following Monday.

Fig. "B" is an ancient Sumerian hieroglyph, showing how best to plant a tree, using one's hand, a rake, and some Hot Pockets ®. If you think this led to successful crops, well, have you had any postcards from Sumeria lately?

Anthropologists have finally decided, after years of fierce bickering, that fig. "C" is an Egyptian guy's shopping list. It would appear that he needed to stop off at the Nile-O-Rama and pick up some asterisks, eye drops, a fish for dinner, toothpicks and gummy worms. He didn't get to the store after all, as he suffered a rupture trying to carry a stone tablet around in his toga. Toga. Toga!

I finally got the printer printing and scanning but it took longer than it should have. Words might have helped. A thousand of them would have saved me from looking at the picture of where the print cartridges went, or was that a picture of the filtration system at Grand Coolee Dam?

Dam if I know.