Dan Mancini

While gathering information to write a process for degaussing a hard drive this week, I was leafing through an old corporate job aid and came upon what may be the most awesome warning I’ve ever seen published in a technical document:

It offers a treasure trove of enjoyment for the hipster-technical writer-ironist: the all-caps; the dual exclamation points; the comet tail of asterisks; the use of the word “horseplay” (which, trust me, never appears in technical documents); the comma splice. It’s a cornucopia of bad taste and even worse grammar.

But don’t let the authorial incompetence obscure the warning’s poetically concise declaration of the frailties of the human condition. Let’s face facts: The minute you name something “Degaussing Wand” there will be horseplay. No warning will prevent it, which lends this particular warning a kind of sisyphean pluck. If, as Keats claimed, beauty is truth, and truth beauty, then this warning is gorgeous despite its typographical shouting and asterisk abuse.

Peace out, knuckleheads.