Writing instruction manuals is one of the most thankless jobs on this earth. When you do your job properly, people are only going to read it when they're already mad at one of your coworkers screwing up. That's why it's really important to take a moment right now and thank the person who wrote the manual that saved your bacon the other day.
When you're writing a specification, you're not just constructing some boring technical document. No, you're laying a garden pathway for the amazing future that will inevitably result if only everyone follows your directions to the letter. Of course, we all know that no specification is followed exactly, or is even comprehensible to most of the people implementing it. You're different, though. You're the chosen one.
Throughout history, humanity has been in need of instructions. We are all trying to make stuff that gets along with other stuff. You can't make a clock, for instance, if the idiots making the gears all had crazy independent ideas about how big the teeth on them should be. That has to get written down somewhere, and then (more importantly) you have to force those suckers to read it.
You might think that an instruction manual is simpler, by comparison. Rather than describe something that has yet to exist, in all its infinite possibilities, you just explain how a thing that already exists works. This is a vacuum cleaner. Here's the "on" button, it turns it on. Write that shit down, take an early lunch. The problem, as always, comes when there are problems.
At some point, you are going to have to add a Troubleshooting Section, which explains how you should shoot trouble. Perhaps your vacuum cleaner customer has run over a Barbie®'s head, and in the process of scalping her, the hair has gotten tangled around the beater bar, jamming that in place and then stripping the entire gearset and/or drive belt that runs the bottom end. If you just say "take it to a technician," they're going to throw your vacuum cleaner through the window of the place where they bought it. That's why Sears went under: too many Barbie heads.
This means that an instruction manual author must also be a prophet of the future. And unlike the specification-writing ding-dongs, there is no room for optimism. Only the cold, pragmatic, borderline-paranoid insights into human nature will protect you here. Thank you, instruction manual writers, for trying your best. Even though your diagnosis trees always end in "go throw it through the window of the nearest Sears."
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