Dubious Quality

This came to mind today, because it was time to change one of my windshield wipers. 

I do this every 2-3 years, if that often. You take the wiper arm off by turning and sliding a doohickey in certain directions, then you attach a new doohickey into an arm and the doohickey clicks in some manner. 

That's the technical explanation, anyway. 

This should be easy, but I make it hard. The doohickey is plastic, so I'm always concerned about exerting too much pressure and breaking said doohickey. It all feels so simple when I'm done, but I forget everything by the time I need to do it again. 

Then there are instructions. 

Representing rotation in 2D is inherently impossible for me to understand. It's also a very nice touch that the actual doohickeys are so dark in the picture that's hard to see exactly what attaches where. 

Then the doohickey came off the new wiper blade. it was pre-installed, so now I had to figure out how to put it back on, but no matter how I put it together, it never seemed tight like it was at first. I was also supposed to rotate the doohickey into a vertical position, which seemed impossible. 

It was 15F outside, so perfect weather to be screwing with this for an extremely long time. 

After squinting at the illustrations from a distance of approximately 3" for several minutes, I punted and watched a YouTube video. This is the first thing I should have done. This is the first thing I should always do. 

After watching the video, I realized where the rotation was supposed to take place (I just needed to squeeze harder than I had been to release the part to rotate). Then I sort of held the doohickey in place and slid the hook around the doohickey and pushed something in some sort of way and everything clicked into place. 

Gee, that was easy. I'm sure I'll remember next time.