Last night I was craving oatmeal.  So I searched the cabinets and found a bag of Chinese brand (Sea Mild) instant oatmeal.  Only one problem: the instructions on the back of the package were in Hanzi (汉字) a.k.a Chinese characters.  I couldn’t make out some of the important instructions…but seriously how hard can it be?  You just boil water and put the oats in, right?

But I’m a big-time, instructional, recipe-reading kind of guy.  I can be spontaneous but really don’t like to when it comes to procedures.  I was once a procedure analyst after all…

So I decided to look up the company online.  I’m convinced with the proper motivation and diligence, you can find anything online. 

Sure enough, here’s their web address: http://www.seamild.com.cn

From this page you can choose Chinese or English.  Guess which one I chose?  And then I found my product and the instructions I was looking for.  I’m so glad I went to the trouble.  It was the best laugh I’ve had all day.  Here are the instructions (with my commentary in brown):

Pure oat meal (in bags) 700g  [bags are a good way to contain it]

The pure natural west wheat oat meal from Australia, include and enrich inferior oleic acid, oat glue [glue??] and soluble meal fibre, Offer sufficient nutrition for the human body; The cholesterol, candy, salt or antiseptic are sucked [already sucked candy–gross!], is 100% of the pure natural nutrition food, And adopt Australia’s brand-new production technology [and why not adopt their market strategy as well…], guarantee product quality; It is easy to modulate, fragrant slippery delicious food [easy for some! you try modulating slippery food!] ; The edible method is simple and convenient, the hot water is washed [how do they wash the water?] and adjusted ( exempt and is boiled): Pour half a cup( 3-4 soup spoon ) of oats meal of SEAMILD into in the bowl, add a cup of boiling water or the milk and is fully mixed thoroughly, Can eat in 3 minutes [if I was a starved horse maybe I could eat it in 3 minutes!]. Add salt and ham [ham?] become another salty oatmeal of flavor. Can add all kinds of batching, such as milk, soy milk, fruit juice or chopped scallion [it’s nice with calamari], beef, egg,etc. even more, Cooperate with different taste [c’mon you know you wanna], become gold partner newly with west wheat milk, have more convenient nutritions also, Pursue the masses of teenagers and working people. [Pursue them with your beefy oatmeal!  Pursue them until they submit!]