RE: RE: Indexing style refs

[Sean Brierley <seanb_us -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I bet that car was a Q#W$!# -at- $!F#$!ing Misubishi
Eclipse. <g>

A friend of mine watched the kids the other night,
came home, the alarm is going off. Turns out, the kids
(my kids) set the bugger off and the friend had no
idea how to fix it; and her key fob was dead--worn out
battery.

I disconnected the battery in the car and went to the
index in the owner's manual. "Alarm," "Panic," 
"Security," and other terms I thought of (I didn't
think of "theft") were not indexed whatsoever. Nor was
the TOC a clue. I found the info. I needed by paging
through the book one page at a time until I happened
across the relevant section, which told how to turn
off the alarm without the key-fob radio transmitter.
Nice.

Of course, if the owners manual had been electronic, I
would not have had it, but a search would have found
the info fairly quickly. Still, one cannot judge the
effectiveness of indexes by bad ones, and I still
maintain that a good index trumps search.

(I wrote "Alarm" into the index of the book with the
page number, when all was said and done.)

Cheers,

Sean

--- Maggie Pierce Secara <maggiros -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> 
> But the index also has to be useful, not just
> accurate.  
> 
> I just bought a car, and I wanted to something about
> how
> the alarm system worked.  There was nothing in the
> owner's
> manual under "alarm".  In fact, the only entry that
> addressed the alarm at all was "theft-prevention
> system". 
> Oddly enough, I wasn't focussing on theft; I was
> thinking
> of arming/disarming the alarm. (Nothing under
> "arming"
> either.) That's hardly whimsical or frivolous. I
> only found
> the page I wanted by flipping through the book. Once
> I
> figured out what they were calling it, I could look
> it up
> in the index. How nice.