While we’re waiting, I’ll offer some insights into another area of technology: kitchen appliances. My husband and I recently replaced all of our kitchen appliances, our old ones having ranged in age from 15 to 25 years. My husband’s observation, seeing the difficulty I had adapting to my new kitchen, “Old people shouldn’t be allowed to get new appliances.”

My own observations aren’t much more optimistic:

• Operating the new appliances is not as transparent as operating the old ones.
• The confusing design that started with the VCR has now crept into the kitchen.
• The harder an appliance is to use, the more cryptic the manual.
• Ads and manuals place a lot emphasis on “features” but rarely explain what those features are for and why the consumer would want to use them.

My 20-year-old microwave oven came with a thick instructions manual that included pictures of the type of cookware I could and could not use and hints on how to use the cookware and the oven’s features to get the most out of my new appliance. It showed how to stack certain pieces of cookware to take advantage of the wave pattern and to contain spills. I also received a free cookbook with over 100 pages of recipes designed specifically for my microwave. This experience spoiled me, leading to disappointment when I got my new appliances.

For My Kenmore Elite refrigerator what I really needed were suggestions about how to fill it. The freezer’s “Pizza Shelf” was self-explanatory, as was the pull-down “casserole shelf” in the refrigerator. But there was a strange compartment at the top of the refrigerator door that had a direct pipeline to the freezer. I had no clue as to what to keep in this compartment, which was good, because I also had no clue as to how to open it. I finally discovered that a compartment-wide plastic lever that covers the bottom surface of the compartment has to be flipped up, triggering the unattached cover to roll back, allowing access to the compartment. I put stuff in there that I don’t need very often.

After about an hour of arranging and rearranging items in the fridge/freezer with limited success, I logged onto the Sears website to see if I could get some customer support. I didn’t find any further documentation, but I did find a picture of an open, fully stocked refrigerator in a model similar to my own. I printed the picture and attached it to the side of the fridge to use as a loading guide.

One would think that an oven and cook top would by nature be transparent. One would be wrong. The cook top should have been the simplest appliance to operate. Put a pan of something on the burner. Turn it on. Adjust heat up or down as needed. That’s usually the way cook tops operate, isn’t it? Not if the cook top is glass, and you have 60-year old copper-bottom cookware. The burner got hot; my skillet didn’t. My stockpot, filled with water for pasta, heated up after a long time, and then rocked perilously from side to side. It took me 45 minutes to cook pasta.

It appears that one needs special cookware to cook on a glass cook top, something that the manual glossed over (after giving me detailed instructions on how to clean and maintain the glass surface.) I don’t mind getting new cookware, but I haven’t a clue what to buy, since the manual didn’t cover that.

My oven has digital controls and is therefore the most complicated. The biggest problem with its thin, barely adequate manual is that it never explains what some of the features are for. For example, what is a “Sabbath Feature,” under what circumstances would one need it, and what does it have to do with cooking something for more than 12 hours?

The oven does a nice job of baking, but the controls are confusing. For example, if you want to bake, which is what you usually do with an oven, you could push the “Bake” button, but you could also push “Preheat”. What do you do when the oven finishes preheating? You put your stuff in and set the timer--not the one labeled “Bake Time” but the one labeled “Timer On/Off”.  The fun really begins when you set the timer. Remember those cheap digital clocks now moldering in your closet or a landfill—the ones where you had to keep holding a button while it cycled through the 24 hours of the day minute by minute? That’s how you set the timer on my oven, only this timer also cycles through seconds—one button for up, one button for down. After you reach about 5 minutes, the cycling speeds up uncontrollably (like highlighting pages of text with a mouse in Word.) That’s why you have a down button, so you can scoot back and forth until you miraculously land on the 20 minutes you wanted to set. Then you have to figure out how long it took you to set the timer and move the timer back that many minutes.  I don’t demand a numeric keypad like my microwave has, but replacing the “up” and “down” buttons with “hour” and “minute” buttons would be an improvement (I doubt that one needs to count seconds in a conventional oven.) Once the timer is set, your experience with other timers might incline you to punch the “Timer On/Off” button again to get the timer started. That would be another mistake. It would turn the timer off, prompting you to use your old non-digital countertop timer rather than mess with trying to re-set the oven timer.

Then there is the control marked “Cancel”. Say you are baking something and have made a terrible mess with the timer (which I did the first few times I set it.) Now you decide to use your old countertop timer and forget the oven timer. So you hit the “Cancel” button. You didn’t cancel the timer. You just turned off the oven.

I’m pretty sure I know what the “Clean” button does. I’ll have to wait till the oven is dirty to test my theory. At the rate I’m going, this won’t happen soon.

I checked the Frigidaire website to see if they offered recipes and suggestions for using my oven and cook top, but the only support they offer is a manual in .PDF format, which gives even less information than the booklet I have. I checked Amazon.com, but I didn’t see a listing for “Frigidaire Ovens for Dummies.”

So this has been my experience with my new kitchen appliances. Eager to learn how to make the best of several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, I get lots of installation and maintenance instructions and little or no advice on how to use the appliance. Can you imagine getting a software program that explained at length how to install and update the software and left it to you to figure out how to use the program?

Since I’m usually the one that writes the documentation for programs, I’ve become fairly comfortable at hacking my way through the software to figure out what each feature does and what results it produces. Somehow I can’t bring myself to feel the same way about hacking an oven. No matter what I do, my computer won’t come on at 3AM and heat up to 500 degrees.

To its credit, my new Goldstar microwave oven occasionally offers me a hint. If I put in two cups of liquid and press the “liquid” button (labeled with an icon of a cup) twice it heats the liquid and tells me to “stir” at the end of the cycle. If I use the “popcorn” button, the end-of-cycle message says, “enjoy.” Well, that’s a start...