I Hate Instruction Manuals...

.... that are badly written.

I got a new cellphone this weekend, and I've read that blasted book kivver to kivver to find an answer to a problem I've been having with downloading a ringtone. Despite two separate LONG phone calls with Customer Service, I still can't get the ringtone from my inbox to my phone.

The second rep with whom I spoke was walking through the process with me, using her computer's guide to my phone style and everything, and her information didn't even match up with what was appearing on my screen.

PFFPTH!!!!!

But it does take pictures, and that's kinda cool.

As I'm reading the instruction manual, I continue into the part about all the health warnings, and there's a rather extensive section in there about what the FDA and the FCC are doing to study the long-term ramifications of putting all that buzzy stuff up next to your head. There's no way they can practically ever accomplish this -- there are just too many variables -- a point they concede.

But what made me go, "Hm" was this: they are very upfront with the fact that all studies being conducted around the world involve lab animals.

Let me say here and now that I hate that animals are used for testing things like whether it's safe to poke mascara in your eye, or to drink shampoo as an apertif. Dumb, really, and if you have to have an animal made sick to make you stop doing these things you really ought to apply to BE a lab animal.

I have no problem, though, with studies that actually can mean real information about cures for diseases, if those studies are carried out without unnecessary suffering to the animals.

But this little section in my instruction booklet did make me ask this question: do people who advocate for PETA -- including those who are radically and sometimes aggressively over the top about using animals to study cures for cancer, Alzheimers, etc. - use cellphones? They would encourage us not to wear leather, not to wear fur, and to eat nothing that uses any animal byproduct in order to decrease the demand for these items. Why aren't they encouraging us not to use cellphones -- by example -- until testing on animals ceases?

I have nothing against anyone who has an ethical belief and sticks to it consistently, so wouldn't a PETA member who falls under that description have an imperative not to have a cellphone?