On Manualism
Manualism is a twelve step plan designed to get you off of Manualism. This is a worthy goal which can never quite be achieved due to the unmentioned things.Life is a never ending struggle against time, water, and dirt. You may lick water, and you may lick dirt, but time will always get you in the end because nature is crooked. There are no right angles in nature. Only through persistence and curiosity will you find the way to the unmentioned things.
You may be a manualist and not even know it.
Skip Ahead to the 12 Steps! or Find out about manualism now.
About Manualism:
It is the manualist's task to uncover the unmentioned things. Sometimes things are unmentioned on purpose, other times it is an accident or an oversight. One has to log on to manualism, it can not log on for you. The system shuts down for house keeping between bedtime and rising. Manualists rarely meet in close proximity.
A few hints:
Keep all your books and papers forever. Those "keys I should have pressed" and those "books I should have read" will do you no good right now. Just because it is written on paper doesn't mean it's true.
Facts of Life:
The art of not mentioning is the gift of liars and lawyers. But it is also in the craft of artists and designers. The purpose of not mentioning can be good or bad. When we have problems we have fear - fear of the unknown. When things are not mentioned, some things are not known. With fear comes insanity. To fix the fear we must solve our problems or sometimes find a new job. Dread of the fear will be dealt with in a latter treatise.
These are the 12 steps of Manualism:
Step One: "We admitted we had a problem that we were powerless to solve." Step Two: "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And perhaps we could go home." Step Three: "We made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves." Check your pockets. Sometimes you put things in there that you need but you don't remember doing it. Also, don't throw away any of those little scraps of paper with writing on them. Go through every manual stopping at the index first, then the table of contents, and finally flip through the whole thing while rubbing your fingers together chanting the mantra "oh the unmentioned things, oh the unmentioned things..." Step Four: "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to technical support as it is defined under technical support on page 1 of the user's manual." Step Five: "We admitted to technical support, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs." * If you are all alone locked up in somebody's office after hours, you can count yourself as the other human being. By this time you're probably talking to yourself anyway. Step Six: "We were entirely ready to have technical support remove all these defects and these characters." Step Seven: "We humbly asked technical support to remove our shortcommings." Hopefully we got the technician that knows what is going on. Sometimes you don't get the right call on the first try. Just remember: "he's in the details" Step Eight: "We made a list of all the persons it had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all." All those users who got shut out before they could save their files, all the accountants who can't balance now, all the DP clerks who must re-enter their batches, I would like to help them out, "but they saw the light." Step Nine: "We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others." Step Ten: "We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong we promptly admitted it." Once I thought I brought a philips screw driver, but I was wrong. Most people have one in a drawer somewhere. Step Eleven: "We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with technical support, if we could understand them, praying only for knowledge of their will for us and the power to carry that out." Step Twelve: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to local BBS's and user's groups and bothered to make notes so we would know what to do next time."
Other Cyberspiritual Texts
Native Number Base for the human body
System Administrator's Purity Test
A Manualist's Haiku Collection