Butchering Engrish

 

The unthinkable happened yesterday.  The coffee kettle absolutely refused to work.   What to do?  It was an emergency that I had foreseen, and I had another one of a different brand ready for something like this to happen.  

There was a lot to do.   Take it out of the box.  Rinse it out a couple of times.  Fill it with water.  Set it up and turn it on.   Clearly this couldn't happen all at the same time, so I boiled water in a saucepan.   Then eventually I checked out this new invention.  There were many buttons.  The old one had one button that switched itself on automatically when I put the kettle on the base with water in the kettle.  You should have seen all the buttons on this kettle!  There was a yellow one, a green one, a blue one, a purple one, and a red one.  Oh dear.  "Is this from China?" I wondered.   Mrs. Billingsley looked at the spelling of the brand name on the box.  "How do you pronounce that??" she asked.   Well, it was a name not to be uttered by profane tongues.  

First,  I supposed I should rinse it out a couple of times with water.  Don't get any funny ideas.  Not with gasoline.   How do you open the lid?  You play around with it for a while.   Mystery solved.  

I plugged in the base, and adorned it with the kettle and began pressing buttons.   Was there an on/off?  There were two buttons side by side on the handle, one saying 100%.  That sounded good.  Right away pretty little red lights twinkled around the base of the kettle.  How cute.   Before long, but not any sooner than one could boil water in the microwave,  the water in the kettle was boiling.  If you think you're ready to make coffee now, you're sadly mistaken.  The kitchen filled with the weird smell of plastic burning.   I looked the kettle over.  Had I left a plastic bag over the kettle?  Things looked OK.  Well, that was it for yesterday.  

I floundered around today wondering what to do.  Then it occurred to me to read the instructions.  And entertaining reading it was.  Check the voltage on your outlet to be sure it's the correct voltage it said.   How?  Stick your finger into the outlet?  Call an electrician?  We weren't to the "Call an electrician" part yet.  It was there though.  Later.  There were many subjects and predicates missing.  The "to be" verb seemed to be unheard of in Chinese, so why translate it?  Don't forget, it would have to be conjugated.   Then there were odd ways of patching a sentence together upside down and backwards.  Plurals at random intervals.  After about half an hour of guesswork on what these important safety warnings were about, the question was not yet answered about what all the colored buttons did.  However, we weren't to that part yet either.  There were the explosions to talk about.  Keep this appliance away from explosives.  Really?  All the bombs in the kitchen have to go?   And was I thinking of giving up and trying to heat the kettle on a burner on the stove?  Yes.   Beware of children near the appliance.  

So I'm still perusing the instruction manual.