Having recently had a similar experience attempting to assemble a large IKEA wardrobe, I felt very sympathetic reading of Gerard Vanderleun‘s struggles with his cosmodemonic credenza from Sauder:
Item Weight 125 pounds
Product Dimensions 58.2 x 17.2 x 36.3 inches
Item model number 418344
Assembled Height 36.26 inches
Assembled Width 17.165 inches
Assembled Length 58.189 inches
Weight 133 PoundsSome assembly required.
Some? Some?! This little item took me the better part of 5 hours and left me shaken, exhausted, splinter struck, and drenched in a sweat that fell from the veritable fountains of profanity I launched at this !!!@@**%!*@!! item of our damned age. If it had not been a gift and if I had not just come by a pathological fear of fire, this THING would have been piled in the parking lot in front of my little apartment and set alight while I gibbered and danced about its flames in loincloth, pitchfork and torches.
Most of the first hour of trying to assemble this overweight and overbuilt POS was spent counting the nine (9!) different sacks of nails and connectors and sorting the various wooden slabs (one weighs in at around 50 pounds) and reading the always delightfully ambiguous instructions illustrated by a set of mechanical drawings in the ever-popular “oblique” style.
The next two hours would have found me assembling the various units to the mantra, “Slowly…. and ….. patiently.. and slowly… and…”
The final two hours would have found me in the 9th circle of Dante’s Inferno looking for the way out with only one beer to my name.
I’m not a petite man and I’m not a weak man. But this one brought this man to a new awareness of his age and his mortality; a mortality that I prayed would not kick in until I had hunted down the sadists behind Sauder and stood them all against the wall.
In the end I did get the !!!@@**%!*@!! item built. It stands on the back wall of my living dining area ready to receive the needful things for which it was made. As for me, I had to take to my couch for half a day just to get over the intense fatigue resulting from tossing 125 pounds of pressed wood around my house and trying to cuss it into place.
Following this experience I lay on my couch swearing to never, ever, “assemble” any item of furniture. But guess what? Unless you are ready to lay out serious cash, there are no items like that any more. Everything is Ikea-infected and made of sawdust.
