CONCORD, New Hampshire. An eighth-grade teacher’s love of the Sphinx and the mysteries of the Pyramids was the inspiration that fueled Tim Bogle’s concentration in college, which lead to advanced degrees in Egyptology. “I was so fascinated by the subject,” he says ruefully as fondles a toy mummy, “that I lost sight of how impractical I was being.”
Upon graduation from Northern New Hampshire State University, Bogle found that he was “under water” in terms of his income of $24,250 a year, versus his student loan debt of $37,172. “I loved what I was doing,” he muses, “but I didn’t want to be eating ramen until I retired.”
So Bogle, like many other young specialists in the area, decided to leave the field for a more lucrative job that would bring him higher pay while still allowing him to use the skills he had developed in nine years of higher education earning bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees: motor vehicle owner’s manuals.
Verrry mysterious.
“In many ways, your typical owner’s manual provides a direct link to cryptic ideographic languages of the past,” says Dr. Nigel Flosternak of the University of Illinois-Kankakee. “The little pictorial symbols, the diagrams on paper that bear only a tenuous, superstitious relation to objects in the real world, it’s like cracking the Curse of the Mummy to change the outside temperature display on your dashboard from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
“Look out!”
Hieroglyphic writing employs symbols that may be read as pictures, symbols for pictures, or sounds. They were used only on monuments, while commonplace legal documents such as bills of sale for used camels, condominium deeds and warning labels on snakes were written in a “demotic” cursive script. As a result, hieroglyphs came to be associated with priestly cults, who used them to conceal essential knowledge from poor schlubs who built pyramids and other religious structures for the minimum wage of 1.25 neklas an hour.
“Insert one (1) bulrush into clay brick, stack until pyramid is formed.”
The secretive nature of hieroglyphs and automobile owner’s manuals would appear to defeat the essential purpose of language–communication–but an auto industry insider named Harold Raines who preferred to remain anonymous disagreed. “Why would I let you in on the secret of operating your car?” he asked rhetorically. “If you knew that, you’d never come back to the dealer for overpriced service and name brand automotive parts.”