Hall Of Technical Documentation Weirdness

An anonymous reader submits: "Generally speaking, with the exception of Tina on Dilbert, technical writers aren't very funny. This is something of a rare and unintentional exception. This guy has assembled a bunch of examples of bizarre technical illustration. There's only about 15 at the moment, but he's collecting further examples."

What is wrong with the Slashdot team?

[Anonymous Coward]

This absolute-waste-of-time webpage gets slashdotted and my hundred of gems never saw the light of day?? waaaaah!

It was getting slow.. I have Mirrored it.

[Organized Konfusion]

Mirror [spaceports.com] be gentle to my host plz ;-)

There ya go

[Moth7]

Why Maddox is better than your kids [xmission.com]

Huh

[sg3000]

I know that this page should have been funny, but for some reason, I'm not laughing. And I'm even familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.

I kind of expected something like "Engrish" [engrish.com] or the often funny Airtoons [airtoons.com] (but it's probably only funny for those of us that fly a lot). Or even, the hasn't-been-updated-since-the-millennium Kibo [kibo.com] and his amusing criticisms of font use or Gerald Holmes [freeyellow.com], which has outlived the silly .com web awards that are featured on his site. Hooray for Gerald!

Microfortnights

[Christian Engstrom]

The documentation for the VAX/VMS operating system (this was in the eighties, before they started renaiming it every other year) claimed that one of the system parameters in SYSGEN should be specified in "microfortnights", but then proceeded to say that for added convenience, microfortnights were approximated by "seconds". (If you can't be bothered to bring out your calculator, a proper microfortnight would be 1.2096 seconds.)

At least I thought this was rather funny, but perhaps I am just very childish.

Re:The Law.

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

While it is easy to cite a lawsuit in one sentence and make it sound like it was all without merit, you should do a little fact checking. The situation involved much more negligence on the part of the local McDonalds than most people realize. See this site [lawandhelp.com] to get started.

The group of fat people was thrown out of court because it lacked merit.

Re:japanese toilets

[Neva]

Just in case you want to be prepared:
The instruction manual to japanese toilets [hellonavi.com]

Re:Printed on the "Blank" pages of IBM manuals of

[Jeremy Erwin]

They didn't want customers calling them up complaining about missing pages. So, if every blank page had an acknowledgment of the fact that IBM really, truly meant to leave that page unfilled by black text, then the customer could be assured that it wasn't a printing error.

Consumer Reports "selling it"

[hellfire]

Check out the back page of a Consumer Reports magazine. They have great examples of silly ads, bad technical documentation, and veiled attempts at what can only be explained as attempts to rip people off. They are far more entertaining and funny than this list, which is not very funny or entertaining.

I'd have a web link but Consumer Reports website is a subscription based site you have to pay to get into.

Re:Actually, 'may contain peanuts' has a reason

[sprouty76]

Actualy, peanuts aren't nuts at all, they're legumes. But the rest of your reasoning is correct, some people have violent allergies to nuts but nothing else.

Re:Actually, 'may contain peanuts' has a reason

[arivanov]

Hello city boy. Ever been out of there?

1. Ever seen anything growing under a nut tree (assuming we are talking walnut or similar)?

2. Peanuts are dug from the ground so this means disrupting any tree roots that are there.

Re:Rare and unintentional exception?!?

[gughunter]

> Their job isn't to humor us on how this toaster can kill you when soaked in water while plugged in - it's to be serious and prevent injury and death in many cases.

If The Boomer Bible taught me anything, it's that a funny cautionary message can often be more memorable than a "serious" one.

Re:Best Quote hidden

[Anonymous Coward]

translation
[ezboard.com]
here

Cyrwin-Vega

[BillX]

Documentation of Cerwyn-Vega products tends to be (often intentionally, but sometimes not) quite amusing.