I recently enjoyed a plain Hershey’s candy bar. It was the same sweet, but not too exciting experience that I have had with these plain, brown bars in the past, with one exception. This time when opening the candy bar I noticed instructions on the outside of the wrapper. On one part of the wrapper was a circle in which were the words “Hold Here”. On another part a triangle was pictured containing the words “Lift & pull here. Are we really that stupid? I don’t want to use fallacious logic and say that nobody is, what I am saying is that instructions like these need to be removed. I truly believe that 99% of the world’s population would have no trouble opening an instructionless candy bar, and I say to the 1% who can’t, “If you are injured, or unable to open a candy bar due to lack of instructions, thank you for giving the rest of us a good laugh.” I know candy bars aren’t the only products with seemingly unnecessary instructions. I have had many personal electronic devices that came with such instructions as don’t immerse in water, or keep away from open flame. I occasionally want to go against this kind of instruction just to see exactly what would happen. You are probably saying this argument is moot because these companies have to include these instructions for “legal reasons”. I say that if that is the case, the instruction text should be as condescending as possible. Example: If you have tried in utter futility to open this candy bar and need some additional instructions, first orient the bar so that the side labeled “down” is facing the ground. Now, place your “thumb” on the big red circle that says thumb, and place your index finger on the big blue square that says “finger”. Grab the tab that says pull, and pull it toward the ground using medium force (If I were the candy bar maker, the definition of medium force would be on the inside of the wrapper). All I can say, is that if a candy bar makes you feel dumb, you are dumb.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 12:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.