The electrician said it was a “high tech” bathroom fan, “much better” than the previous.
I blindly trusted.
However, once he left, the fan never turned off.
After some shoot-from-the-hip problem solving, I pulled out the user guide, and that’s when the pain started.
Its sentences were vague, contradictory, and seemed like suggestions rather than directives. The diagrams confused me more than they helped—and that’s pretty hard to do.
I thought to myself: the person who wrote this user guide is out there sipping their coffee, completely unaware of the confusion they’ve caused me this Sunday morning.
Any time our words are used as a map by others, or used to convince others of a change needing to happen, we should pick them carefully. As our words scale to larger audiences, the probability that someone misses the message only increases.