Johnny V. called me last week. He had just shelled out a few grand for that Dell PII 400, with 128 MB RAM and a Canopus Total 3D 128V AGP graphics accelerator. Seems the screen was blank, but everything else seemed to work OK.

"What the hell do I do now, Mort? I've tried everything! I know the power is on to the monitor but the screen is blank!!"

"Do you hear little whirring sounds and do the little lights come on after you boot up?" (note the high tech approach).

"Uh, yeah. So what does that mean?"

"No sweat. Your video card has worked loose during shipment; just open the case and push the card firmly back into its slot. Call me back when you're done."

Twenty minutes later he called back, ecstatic.

"That was it! The friggin' card was loose! Damn those bastards at UPS!!"

Or consider when my wife called me from the Beltway a few weeks ago in a panic. "I just tried to call Sherry on my cell phone but I think I lost all the programmed numbers. Got a "memory is empty" message.

"Didn't you just take it in to Sprint for repairs and they gave you a new Smart Card?"

"Yup."

"Looks like you have the kind that stores your numbers on the card's memory. Your Smart Card flunked it's IQ test. You need to reprogram all your numbers. You're screwed."

I could swear I heard the screech of tires.

We are, as everyone knows, immersed in a veritable sea of high tech. We can't even go to the bathroom without encountering automatic toilets and sinks. We have cars and trains that drive themselves. The elevator talks to you. You never get a real person on the phone any more. There's laser surgery and computer-guided needle biopsies. Synthetic genes and irradiated food. You can file your tax forms electronically and you can take a pill to "get horny." There's satellites for your satellite and with my hand-held GPS I can locate Saddam's swimming pool, accurate to within a few feet. And that "smart bomb" can land on his air mattress after a 500-mile trip.

While our technology is getting better, the instruction manuals are getting a whole lot worse. Many times it seems someone forgot to pack the right instruction manual altogether. Oh sure, they have those great labeled drawings, showing the names of all those buttons and dials (ever notice they never quite match your unit?). And of course there is that "hot line" number to call as a last resort. And they always have that "Troubleshooting" section for you to read BEFORE you call. You know you're in trouble when the first entry reads: "Did you remember to plug in the unit and the second entry reads: "Did you remember to turn on the power?"

Naturally, when you understand who writes these manuals in the first place, it is not at all surprising. Some techno-nerd, whose usual dinner time conversation consists of the merits of copper versus aluminum micro-circuits in a .25 micron chip environment, dictates some instructions for operating the unit from memory, while the engineers scramble to find a drawing that resembles the final product. The rough draft is then translated from the original Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, into English, Spanish, French and German, and all four are packaged into one manual to save printing costs. Finally, somebody shrink-wraps the manual (I guess they're worried about contamination) and packs it at the very bottom of the carton, buried in the shipping foam.

After you figure out where the serial number is for your product (they never tell you where to look or bother to mention which one it is among the half a dozen numbers on the plate) and you have dutifully answered all those stupid questions on the Registration Form (I mean, if you don't register it, you're cooked, right?), including your age, gender and household income, you open the Manual to try to figure out what to do next. Of course the first thing you see is kind of an "inventory" of parts - kind of a "gut check." If you're missing a major component, like the power cord, it's best to stop at this point. This section is usually followed by a short treatise on the wonders and marvels of your new product - the same crap you fell for when you bought the unit in the first place.

Finally, the moment of truth arrives. You plug it in. The digital displays light up. There is that familiar hum  that tells you something is operating inside. That's good, right? Then, of course, you insert those trusty AAA batteries in the remote control and, voila! You're in business! Only, nothing happens. The $1000 gizmo-gadget you just bought is too complicated for even you to figure out. So you jump to the "factory settings" page. You decide you should really set the EVF display to "off," the "input" to "Stereo 1." Or is it "Line A?" The "brightness" to "high." And the "ND filter" to "on."

Now you've REALLY screwed it up. You realize that you have just set your new dooflopper gigity-gadget to PAL instead of NTSC and it only will work in Europe. So before you buy that ticket on the Concorde, you, in desperation, dial that "technical support" number in the back of the book. You verify that it is not the dead of night in the time zone you are dialing, and with fingers trembling, with your heart beating loudly in your chest, you dial the number.

"Welcome to JYK Industries. Thank you for purchasing your new (insert your gizmo name here) product. To assure quality, your call may be monitored. If you know your party's 5-digit extension, you can dial it at any time (yeah, right!). Dial 1 if the screen is blank. Dial 2 if you have a display, but there is a "vertical sync error" message. Dial 3 if you have thrown the unit against the wall in frustration and it is now emitting a high-pitched squeal....