In the old days, when someone bought a device, it came with an instruction manual. It was not necessarily good, but at least it existed. Today we are tossed between two extremes. One is that we receive nothing at all, only a QR code that takes us to the manufacturer’s website, and from there to a PDF, which of course we are supposed to download while standing in the garage, with oily hands and no signal. The other extreme is the multilingual manual: 120 pages in 8–10 languages teaching us not to eat the battery, not to pull the plastic bag over our head, not to throw a broken device into household waste, and, if the child has chewed the button cell, perhaps not to ask for advice on a DIY forum.
These warnings are obviously not there by accident. Somewhere, sometime, someone must surely have tried to dry a cat in a microwave oven, or perhaps calibrate a laser distance meter on the neighbour’s forehead. So the lawyers and product-safety specialists are doing their job: they build into the manual every foreseeable stupidity of human civilisation. The problem is that, meanwhile, the genuinely useful information disappears in the paper forest like a nut in the garage.
For everyday use, I do not need to know that the address of the official brand service centre can be found on the manufacturer’s website. Nor do I need to reread before every switch-on that electronic waste must be treated as electronic waste. A more or less sensible user — I believe I am one — does not need colourful diagrams showing how to take the device out of the box and plug it into the wall socket. What he needs is a reminder. A small folded sheet of paper. In the case of the device. With the things written on it that are not trivial, and that one cannot be expected to remember by heart.
The other day I ran into exactly this problem. I took a digital coating-thickness gauge out of the drawer. This is the small instrument used, for example, to check how thick the paint or lacquer layer is on a car body. A useful thing if one wants to know whether the phrase “original paintwork” really means factory condition, or merely an enthusiastic bodywork specialist and a kilo and a half of filler.
The instrument can measure in automatic mode: you press it against the surface, it beeps, and it displays something. So far, no drama. But you get a more accurate measurement if you first calibrate it with the supplied gauge standard. Calibration is not complicated, just not self-evident. Which button needs to be held down? When should it be released? Should it first be placed on the bare metal plate, or should one measure with the gauge standard first?
What does one do in such a situation? Naturally, switch on the computer. Find the PDF. Download it. Open it. Realise that the document is in eleven languages and about the size of a small short-story anthology. Then type “calibration” into the search field and hope that the PDF’s text recognition was not produced in the same way as photocopied university lecture notes in the 1990s.
At this point I would have licked the sky with joy if there had been an A5 sheet of paper tucked inside the instrument case, saying:
Calibration: with the device switched off, hold UNIT, hold TEST, release the buttons, select Fe/NFe, bare plate, set value, place calibration foil on it, keep probe perpendicular, done.
That is all. I would have been finished in a minute. No digging through a PDF, no rummaging among warning labels and waste-disposal chapters.
My father used to make such notes for himself. By hand, in pencil. Sometimes he stuck them to the inside of the device’s box, sometimes he wrote them on a small slip of paper and placed it in the case. They were brilliant, with only one minor flaw: my father sometimes used abbreviations that only he understood.
And this is where the “faux brain” comes into the picture. For this kind of task, ChatGPT is very useful. We give it the manual as a PDF and tell it what we want: do not summarise the whole document, do not write a legal declaration disguised as a user manual, but prepare a short, concrete guide for everyday use. One that can be printed. In A5 size and placed in the box. And six months later, when the device turns up again, there is no need to launch an expedition to the manufacturer’s website in search of the manual.
This may seem like a small thing, but it is not. A good short guide is not made for idiots. Quite the opposite: it is for people who know how to use the device, but cannot remember every tiny detail. Such a guide does not replace the full manual, but it removes from it a burden it cannot fulfil well anyway: being a quick, clear, practical aid. It is the one that helps when the device is already in our hands, the operation needs to be done, and only one question remains:
“Right then, how the hell do I calibrate this thing?”
Don’t believe me? Well, you can just try it out by clicking this link: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-69f3327031948191b5ab4ae2820bcf01-quick-guide-maker