The RTFM Song (A PC holiday carol)

[murlough23]

O read, O read the manual,
Before you mess with dll's
That might corrupt your Excel files,
And mangle all your fonts and styles.
Read up! Read up! The manual
Shall keep your PC from the depths of hell.

O leave untouched your keys of registry,
And never double-click on exe's,
Unless you like your data exposed,
And jump for joy when your hard drive is hosed.
Reboot! Reboot! The manual
Shall say as last resort when all else fails.

O keep, O keep the manual,
It warns you never to open the shell.
Return that drive you bought from Fry's,
Lest you should void your warranty.
Refund! Refund! They'll tell you never mind,
When they see your computer's Frankensteined.

O please don't post requests repeatedly
For answers available readily.
Nobody likes a newbie who whines,
And asks the same question ten thousand times.
Resist! Resist! The urge to be a troll.
Maybe go outside for a nice long stroll.

O please learn how to Google it!
You'd be surprised how useful it is.
And if results are not in English,
There's this great thing called Babelfish.
Rephrase! Rephrase! Your search returned no hits.
Perhaps you meant "Windows for idiots".

[Vlad!]

Clever

I have noticed though that more and more there is no manual, though. Back in the day, and by day I mean when Altair was a computer company as well as a stellar body, when you bought a computer you got voluminous documentation, including quite possibly engineering diagrams of the circuit board and microprocessor opcode tables if you happened to want to program it. I just bought a computer for work and it came with a fold-out poster that told me how to plug the cables in the right slots.

I mean, I realize that I'm part of the problem here. I don't read manuals, preferring instead to jump right in and figure things out myself. But I have to wonder what is cause and what is effect...are manuals worthless because people like me would rather Google, or do we Google because manuals are worthless?