There is a new laptop in town, ladies and gentlemen, and it goes by the name of radkato, or "wheel kato". Someday I'll post about the origin of my computers' names, but meanwhile I thought you might find amusing the user guide that accompanied my docking station for this new laptop.

Most of you know that a docking station is a place where you can dock your laptop so that it is already connected to the plethora of cables needed to sustain itself; now the rest of you know that as well.

In any case, my dock came with a user guide that is 272 (base 10) pages long. While I have yet to read the guide, its cover makes me believe that I can dock in foreign countries as easily as the QE II, as my guide goes by the following appelations:

• Advanced Port Replicator User's Guide
  
• Guide d'utilisation du replicateur de port avance (APR). Notice how the French make up their own name for "dock" but also allude to the English abbreviation (see above).
  
• Adavnced Port Replicator Benutzerhandbuch. Come on! Deutsch already capitulated to the "Advanced Port Replicator" part in English. Would "User Handbook" have been such a stretch?
  
• Guida dell'utente del replicatore di porta avanzato. In Italian, my dock reaches operatric heights.
  
• Guia del usuario del replicador de puertos avanzado.
  

Now, most of us are quite famliiar, for reasons I need not articulate here, with the procedure of "docking" and it amazes me that 272 pages are needed to explain all of this in so many languages. The Dell laptop itself came with a one-page, large, pictorial explanation of how to set up the laptop. i would think a similar depiction of the docking and undocking procedures would have sufficed.

But then even the airlines go to the trouble of telling you how to buckle and unbuckle your seatbelt.