Late in the evening before his little son’s birthday, a father was trying to put together a complicated toy as a birthday present. He was not making very good progress. There were a lot of parts in that shipping carton. He realized that he should have begun this days ago, but he had left it until the last hour. Yet he had confidence that he could complete the job with his mechanical knowledge. In his haste, he cut his hand badly on a sharp corner, and it bled profusely until bandaged. When he had finished, the handle was upside down, and the toy wouldn’t work. Then he turned to the sheet of directions in the bottom of the shipping carton. He took the contraption completely apart and started over again. He groaned as he remembered the old adage, “When all else fails, read the directions.”…