My dad loved to read manuals.
As far back as I can remember, whenever we got a new appliance, or a new tool, or a board game, or just about anything that came in a box, my dad would painstakingly start by reading the manual first.
And I do mean reading! The new gizmo would be sitting there in its box, and he would take the manual over to his chair, and sit down, and read the entire thing, cover to cover, before he'd do anything else. Only then would he approach the box again, lift the whatchamacallit out of its box, turn it this way and that way, and try to line it up in his mind with what he had just read in the manual.
In his mind, I think that the manual was the true essence of the thing; the thing itself was just an artifact.
At the holidays, when I ripped off the wrapping paper, I would wonder whether I'd been given something simple enough that I could just start playing with it, or whether my gift was something that came in a box, with a manual, in which case he'd make sure that I found the manual first, and sat down and looked at it, before I could proceed to get to the actual toy itself.
Model ships, Lego kits, even Frisbees or skateboards: "Wait! Read the manual first."
It was a different place and time, I suppose.
People don't read manuals now. If there even is a manual! Usually, at best there is a little slip of paper with a QR code that sends you to a YouTube video.
People don't read the manual; they watch the manual on YouTube.
Or they just take the thing out of the box and plug it in and start pushing buttons.
This change greatly disturbed my dad, and I perhaps noticed it most clearly when he would buy a new videogame for his computer. He loved videogames, and was always looking for a new one to try.
But somewhere along the line, videogames stopped having manuals. Instead, every videogame designer, in some sort of lemming-like mass migration, switched from having a manual to explain how to play their game, to instead having the manual built in to the game itself.
With a modern video game, you just install it and fire it up and start playing. But of course you don't know anything. So the game is carefully designed to start with a series of tutorials, carefully designed so that you think you are playing the game, while in fact you are just progressing through the tutorials.
Think of the start of Skyrim, when you find yourself riding in the back of a wooden cart, being taken down to the town square to be tried in front of the local magistrate. Bit by bit, the game teaches you how to move your character around, to walk and run, to find items and experimentally figure out what they are good for, to engage in dialogue with other characters, to build or buy weapons and armor and equip them, and so forth.
You might spend hours playing the game, when in fact you are still just reading the manual.
This drove my dad crazy! He wanted to read the manual!
Sometimes, he would find that the game included a "help" system, where there was a sort of mini-encyclopedia of short descriptions of the important elements of the game. These help systems were often extensive, with hundreds of individual articles covering all sorts of aspects of the game. They were of course never designed to be a manual, but rather to be a simple in-game reference tool, useful if you'd put the game aside for a few months and were now returning to it, trying to remember the difference between a poleaxe and a halberd, or whatever.
But my dad, if he found such a help system in his new game, would immediately stop playing the initial tutorials. Instead, he would painstakingly go through the entire help system, one article at a time, clicking on each topic. Then he'd copy-and-paste the text (or screenshot it, whatever), and put them all into a Word document, and then he'd print out the entire Word document, often dozens or even hundreds of pages long at this point.
And he'd take the printout, and go sit down in his chair, and read the entire thing, front to back.