http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/07/a-weird-set-of-assembly-instructions/ www.visualeditors.com/apple Thu, 17 May 2012 02:05:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/07/a-weird-set-of-assembly-instructions/comment-page-1/#comment-1148 John Zhu Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:10:08 +0000 http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/07/a-weird-set-of-assembly-instructions/#comment-1148 It sounds like a joke, but having worked on assembly instructions before, I won't be surprised if it wasn't. It could easily be a template where the first four steps are the same for every product, and then step 5 is where the individual instructions start, and they just didn't bother to make adjustments for the pieces that required no assembly. When I worked at an ad agency, one of our clients was a manufacturer of door hardware (locks, handles, etc.). We had to do instruction sheets for them, and it was a mess. They sent us wrong diagrams and English instructions with various typos and grammatical errors. The instructions were required to be in Spanish as well, so we had to get it translated. Of course, no one at the firm or at the client's office knew enough Spanish to proof that part of the copy. And just because the address is in the U.S., it doesn't mean those sheets are made in the U.S. Our client's packaging stuff were all printed in China. The most hilariously sad project for that client was doing the packaging for a lock set they hadn't made yet. They said they would make the product to fit the specs of the box. It sounds like a joke, but having worked on assembly instructions before, I won’t be surprised if it wasn’t. It could easily be a template where the first four steps are the same for every product, and then step 5 is where the individual instructions start, and they just didn’t bother to make adjustments for the pieces that required no assembly. When I worked at an ad agency, one of our clients was a manufacturer of door hardware (locks, handles, etc.). We had to do instruction sheets for them, and it was a mess. They sent us wrong diagrams and English instructions with various typos and grammatical errors. The instructions were required to be in Spanish as well, so we had to get it translated. Of course, no one at the firm or at the client’s office knew enough Spanish to proof that part of the copy. And just because the address is in the U.S., it doesn’t mean those sheets are made in the U.S. Our client’s packaging stuff were all printed in China. The most hilariously sad project for that client was doing the packaging for a lock set they hadn’t made yet. They said they would make the product to fit the specs of the box.

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