Five or six years ago we bought our first cellphone.  In all, we likely used it a total of one call a month.  It was extraneous to our needs, but we thought it might be a good idea to have one, for those times when we were away from home and needed to make a call.  Even so, it was hardly used.  We traded it in for another when we thought texting might be a good alternative for those times when we were out-of-country for maintaining contact at low cost.

At that time, although I'm no Luddite, I couldn't figure out how to perform the texting operation using the puzzling, inadequate, incomplete and absurd instructions that came with the Samsung model we were in possession of.  I asked a twelve-year-old neighbour if he could figure it out and it took him all of ten seconds, carefully writing down the instructions for me.  That was two years ago; after having used it to text-message while we were away on holidays, I never used it again, for anything, other than, during that period, for roughly two outgoing telephone calls.

I latterly picked up the poor unused thing and consulting the instruction booklet again - for I'd in the interim discarded the beautifully printed instructions our 12-year-old neighbour had given me - discovered it was as dense, opaque and useless as I had thought it to be two years back.  Another neighbourhood youngster came to the rescue, and sat patiently with me at the kitchen table putting me through the steps required to enable me to send and receive text.

This time I resolved to never discard the instructions that he too took pains to write out for me in lovely detail.