There’s a naughty acronym in the computer software world: R.T.F.M. In family-friendly terms: Read The Flippin’ Manual. It’s the standard rejoinder to a novice on a discussion board who can’t figure out how to hook up his network router to the twisted-base-pair E-47 Ethernet socket. R.T.F.M., Dude. But T.F.M. was written by geeks for geeks in geek-speak! I just want to get on the Internet and watch YouTube!

At some point everyone’s hooking up something or trying to figure out why the wires we hooked up don’t work, and we do R. the F.M., and we’re still lost. Don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. You’re not stupid. You need to understand the rules of modern product manuals. Once you master these six constants of technical writing, this arcane world will finally become understandable. And the most important rule comes first.

Rule No. 1: If the product needs a manual longer than one page, the designer failed.

If Apple sold irons, there would be a picture of someone plugging one in, a picture of someone ironing, and a picture of someone pressing the iron into his face with a slash over the illustration. Don’t do that. That’s all you really need. If your company designs an iron that requires the consumer to sit down with a glass of sherry and a good reading light and devote a solid evening to getting to know his new appliance, you’re doing it wrong. Which leads us to:

Rule No. 2: No one reads manuals.

People shouldn’t have to read manuals. Manuals are written by engineers whose jobs consist of loading up products with dozens of useless, unused features, and whose job security comes from solving the problems caused by the useless, unused features their bosses required them to add to the last version of the product. To see how manuals have devolved, let’s take one ubiquitous tool as an example: the telephone.

In the old days, the phone had no manual. Really. Hard to believe if you’re under 30, but once upon a time phones had no manuals, because it was generally assumed that people knew how to operate them. No one ever moved into a new apartment, saw the phone sitting on the floor, and circled it for an hour like a wary animal before picking it up, hearing the dial tone, and dropping it like it was red hot. It was a phone. If it broke, you called the phone company and asked it to bring another. Of course, it never broke; the old black phones were built to withstand direct nuclear attack, so the cockroaches would have a way to communicate.

Now, suppose you have a problem with your modern phone. You go to its website, hit the “help” button, navigate the dropdown panels to your particular product—consumer> home> phone>cordless>gray>THX11 series—and you get the online manual. Because you threw away your printed manual. You had a strange unearned sense of confidence when you purchased the product, didn’t you? You saw it was full of entries like “Adjusting the Date and Time for Russian Orthodox Calendar” and you figured, Well, it’s a phone. How hard can this be?

And now you’re looking at the online manual in pdf form, and it doesn’t address your problem at all. You remember the last time you called with this problem. The conversation started this way: “Hello, thank you for calling TechCorp, how may I raise your blood pressure by reading solutions off a list from which I cannot deviate?”

That tech support guy had consulted the manual you’d thrown away and given you a solution: Unplug the phone and let it rest for five minutes. Huzzah and hello, that solved the problem. You try it again on your own. It solves the problem. Which brings us to:

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