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>I became more and more angry about the picture with the happy people.
Few vendors expect repeated crashes with their product, so they try to
make using it a cheerful experience. The "happy people" (although not
really an example of humor) are probably appropriate for the vast
majority of their users, unless the product completely sucks. I would
suggest that vendors who expect repeated crashes in their products avoid
populating the product with cheerful images.
In all of the discussion about humor in tech. writing, nobody said "make
all of your writing funny." When techwr-lers weren't condemning humor in
manuals outright, they were mainly suggesting that humor, where
appropriate, makes reading a document more enjoyable. (See any Dummies
book for examples.)
Humor in the troubleshooting section? Probably (although not absolutely)
something to avoid. Humor in the "concepts" sections? Something to use if
you can, especially if the concepts are dry-n-boring but necessary to
read.
In other words, if you use some freakin' judgment when applying humor to
your writing, everybody wins. If you don't trust your judgment, avoid
humor, because you'll probably just annoy someone.
