When or when not to guess

I've never been afraid of instruction manuals or asking for directions. It's probably my female side manifesting itself, but there you go.

When we first met, Jan commented that she had never before been out with a man who would stop and ask for directions. In normal circumstances I would have made a smart ass reply but it was still early days in our relationship so, unusually, I let it go. My logic is, 'if you don't know, find out.' Don't sit there guessing.

It reminds me of an incident in a previous life when I would visit branches throughout the UK and was usually driven by the local AVP or Supervisor. This particular time I was in unfamiliar territory and we were driving from one town to the next. Time was tight, it was late in the day and I fancied a drink. My sense of direction told me that we were driving in the wrong direction which wasn't going to address my urgent needs. I asked the so called intelligent man who was driving and whose patch it was if I could look at his map.

'What map?' he said.

'The bloody map you should have in your car if you haven't got a clue about where you're going,' I screamed in his ear.

We stopped at the next garage and bought one.

Anyway, we were at a friend's holiday home the other day and we had to ask the local chauffagist to come and show us how to get this central heating system working properly. It was a big, complicated oil fired system and we only had half the instructions. It was apparent that he was guessing as he twiddled with all the knobs and buttons. He didn't look once at the instructions that I waved in front of his nose, and in the end I downloaded a complete set of instructions off the internet and did the job myself.

Don't get me wrong, even with instructions it can be difficult. Jan bought a Black and Decker Dustbuster the other day and because it was raining and she was bored she read the instructions. You'd have thought that with their vast experience of selling a myriad of products B&D would have learnt something by now.

I quote:

"Identifying Your Product

The model design can be determined from the suffix codes used in the catalogue number. The following catalogue numbers are described in this manual: NV19XXY/NV24XXY/NV36XXY/NV48XXY/NV60XXY

The suffix code XX corresponds to the following designs:

00/99: stick handle, no accessories supplied

03: loop handle, supplied with crevice tool and brush tool

The suffix code Y is used to identify the range of colour options. The suffix code Y represented by the letter N is used with NiMH battery."

We decided that we didn't really want to identify our product and would guess instead! It was however a nice sunny day.