Home Life: Some assembly required...

I'm trying to think back to who really gave me the raw thumbs and forefingers that I have right now.  Do I blame myself for being too stupid?  Hell no!  America is a litigious society, and if I was too ignorant, how can it possibly be MY fault.  

I could blame my parents, but I don't think I could do that without sounding like a whiny bitch that needs to gain everyone's approval through an appearance on Maury Povich.  I might as well be a midget stripper with a crack habit that sleeps around.  

"It ain't my kid, Maury?  YES!  In your face, biatch!  Time to kick it with an 8 ball back at the trailer park and celebrate by boinking some other white trash ho.  See you in 9 months, Mr. Connie Chung!"

Maybe some insight can be gleaned with a little flashback to "back in the day."  Ah, to be back in the simpler times...

When I was a young kid, I loved to play with blocks.  You know... the set included various sized chunks of wood all smoothed down and splinter free and ready for a kid's imagination.  Usually I'd build a complex roadway for my Hot Wheels, or stack up large towers for my action figures to have adventures on.  It was pretty rad.

No, I do not call them dolls.  They are fucking action figures.  The big ones are called stuffed animals, and are not dolls either... no matter how you dress them up, or even if you have tea parties with them.  And, no, that's not an admission of guilt, asshole.  Them's the facts!

Even in the doll world, I think you have to be careful with terminology though.  Barbie isn't really a doll, she's an action figure too.  She has moveable parts, and she really is ready for action.  She's the biggest slut of the Mattel line up (and quite possibly of all toys).  But can you blame her?  If you had a boyfriend that wasn't anatomically correct, you'd be pretty horned up too... especially after 50 years or so without getting anything more than a little light petting and a lot of cold showers in her Malibu dream house.

At least G.I. Joe has the kung-fu grip.  That's gotta count for something.

Back to blocks... The set that I had was a natural wood color, not that bright colored pablum that you see in stores these days.  All I needed was my blocks, my Hot Wheels, and maybe some Lincoln Logs, and I was ready for a full day of entertainment!

Over the years, I tricked out my blocks quite a bit.  Some of them I colored various shades from the big box of 64 crayons (with the sharpener in the back), markers and paint.  And as I got older I actually broke out the caulking gun and permanently affixed parts together for maximum stability.  When you're trying to see how far a die-cast mini '65 Mustang will fly and the jump keeps sliding around, you have to do something drastic!

After the blocks, I moved up to Legos.  Legos really do open up a new world for kids.  Yes, a smaller kid will fuck around building crazy multicolored houses and lego brick turds that are supposed to be dogs and all kinds of fucked up shit.  Hell, I'm sure I did all kinds of crazy crap like that.

I still do.  Though, I've moved away from Legos.

It's the ten year olds that start to feel that urge to build stuff that actually works and looks good.  So they start following the instruction booklet in the Lego Super Space Kit or whatever.  Then they have to get the Moon Mobile Unit (with wheels that have a motor!) and the Solar Panel Satellite Package and the Space Shuttle Deluxe and whatever else the kid needs.  And parents rationalize it because, "They're being creative," or, "It keeps them off drugs," or, "At least they're not bothering me anymore."

And it's at this point that the seed of a problem is planted.

Later, in college, I went to my tiny little dorm room and met my roommate.  He had a great idea.

"Let's get these beds off the fucking floor and build a loft," he said with a smile.

It sounded completely reasonable.  So we bought all the tools and lumber and made a loft for both of our single beds, so we'd sleep heads to opposing walls, toes to toes.  He was  Chad Vila, and I was Pat Vila.  At least that was the stupid fucking joke we repeatedly made as we cobbled together the rickety piece of shit that somehow managed to last all school year.  I think I only bled twice.

The one thing that was really different from my youth was the beer.  That sure did hit the spot after working hard all day.  Of course I was only 18 and I was living on a dry campus, so I had to be doubly sneaky about it.

I built a loft the next year too with my next roommate, having a couple of cold ones along the way.  It was just like playing with blocks with a buzz.  Natural wood and attach them together.  But instead of a cool ramp to watch a soaring mini Micro-Bus, I was building shitty furniture that no one would ever buy themselves.  But, then again, we weren't using a manual.

It all started to go terribly wrong in the late 90's, early 00's, or as my sister called the year 2000, "20 balls."  There was a switch in the economy, and everyone was turning into do-it-yourselfers.

And that was especially apparent in the furniture market.  The idea of build it yourself furniture was so simple!  There were no craftsmen involved.  It was just machines to cut up particle board and laminate it, stuff the pieces into a box and ship it off to market.

And of course there were plenty of technical writers employed to make sure that people could comprehend the directions and be satisfied with the results.  Then again, who the fuck can understand a technical writer?

The directions were translated (and probably poorly done) into German, French and Japanese, and there were plenty of schematic drawings to aid in the confusion about how it all comes together.  Parts were labeled with letters of the alphabet or numbers, at least in the booklet, but rarely on the pieces themselves.  But you had to lay the whole mess on the living room floor, spend 2 hours looking from the manual to the parts... and you found yourself scratching your balls because a) you couldn't figure out the instructions, and it's a good alternative to strangling the dog, b) it felt better than scratching your head, and c) it provided more satisfactory results than that cheap ass end table ever would.

Then IKEA came to town, and we were all fucked.

Now, instead of mildly helpful instructions in English, German, French and Japanese, IKEA decided to do away with all of that and rely strictly on pictures.  Not only that, but they called their furniture and accessories by strange, outlandish names like EKTORP, KVIBY, BEDDINGE MURBO... and using all the fucking crazy letters in your dingbat collection of fonts.  So now not only can we not even put it together, we can't even pronounce its fucking name.

Needless to say, people have been confused ever since.

"Uh, yes... I'd like to return this... whatever you call it... please," says Joe Customer to the IKEA employee after spending 4 hours trying to build a desk and finally giving up in frustration, miraculously without breaking anything noticeable.

"Hur stå det till idag?" she asks gleefully.

"Excuse me?" Joe says, his breath smelling of the half dozen barley pops he quaffed to suppress his rage.

"Du skulle lik till återvanda den har?"  She smiles.

"Huh???" Joe pleads, starting to scratch his balls.

"˙∂߃˚¬∫ß∂©ƒøˆ ∂ˆß¨ƒøˆßœº £§®∂߈ •åπø πßø˙ƒß˜ ˚∆˜√∆˚??" she replies.

Just when Joe is ready to leave, she looks to the security camera quickly and notices it's turned the other way.  She grabs his arm and talks quietly, not moving her mouth.  "Please help," she mutters in her thick swedish accent.  "I am being held captive against my will."

Before Joe can react, her supervisor in a bright blue and yellow jacket comes out and removes her from the register, never to be seen again.  He will never forget the look of abject terror in her eyes.

And it wasn't just IKEA that broke all the rules.  They gave other companies the moxie to join in on screwing everyone right up the ol' poop hole, like Target, Wal-mart and a host of others.  Soon everyone was doing it.  Regular furniture stores were making this shit available too!

For about five years, it seemed like every time I bought furniture it was the same story.  No words, bad pictures, no satisfaction and limited results.  Fuck me!

The tide has turned a little bit for us that have been forced into do-it-yourselfitude.  I went to Target with the wife, and we picked out a six foot tall (media) cabinet/bookshelf.  And it said, "No tools needed!"  

What a crock.

But I unpacked it, opened up the manual expecting a technical writer's bad date in a Pictionary contest, and was surprised by... words!  Not only were they words, but they were English words.  Fuck the Frogs, Krauts, and all the ones that still have a solvent auto industry... English only, assholes!

And, surprisingly, the words on the box were right.  No tools were actually needed to put it together.  However, I found a few taps with a hammer to be helpful from time to time.

But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a bitch to do.  First off, all the little plastic pieces came from a mold, so you had to snap off pieces from the framework, like that time I tried to put together a model car and gave up after about an hour.  I hate that shit.

And again, no tools doesn't mean no work.  Flexing your digits to break off plastic pieces and stick them in particle board with a thin laminate covering that will seriously peel away with the slightest nudge is enough to work up a sweat for me.  And the skin of my fingers was slowly skimmed away from rough edges, pointy plastic parts and trying to exert maximum force with minimal breakage to fit it all together while trying not to drip sweat in the project area.

Of course, both my mother's and father's sides of the family are all serious sweaters.  I always try to laugh it off by saying that my gene pool is deep with sweat, which some smarter folks find clever and some dumb asses find confusing.  But none of that helps when the temperature hits 95 and my face looks like a fucking slip-n-slide.

If it weren't for all the guitar playing I've done my whole life, I don't think my fingers would have survived nearly as well.  If it weren't for the beer, I think I would've broken something on purpose.

And, here's a little tip for all you break-it-yourselfers.  Get a bunch of different colored furniture markers.  You know you're going to fuck up somehow, and it's a great way to cover it all up and make it less noticeable.  And it's as easy as coloring the blocks I used to have.

So, now I've typed out this whole post, my fingers still raw from the weekend.  But who do I blame:  The blocks?  Legos?  Maury Povich?  My parents for buying me all that shit?  My first college roommate?  What's a descendant of a Norwegian grandfather to do?

I'll do what Norwegians do best.  I'll blame the Swedes.