Step 37: Valium

So the other day Mrs. Smoot decided she wanted to buy a new desk. She may have made this decision based on the amount of work she does from home, or because she's taking college classes and needs to organize things better. I'm thinking she decided on a new desk merely because I haven't suffered a serious mental breakdown in recent history.

I'm certainly not against the desk, in principle. I didn't really even mind spending half an hour late at night in the a parking lot pondering how we were going to jam this giant box into my Prius. I'm sure we provided a lot of entertainment for the fine employees of Staples. (We eventually removed all of the parts from the box and stuck them in the car individually.)

I didn't really even mind lugging all of these individual, and often heavy, parts up the stairs to the desk's final destination.

The hairy part is putting the darned thing together, given the half-hearted attempt at directions that are hidden amongst all of the parts. And believe me, there were lots of parts. Looking at the room, one would have assumed that I was about to build a fully functional freight locomotive.

If you know anything about me, you know that manual dexterity is not really my thing (I'm not even sure what "my thing" might actually be; I should probably try to figure that out). So the instruction manual was rather intimidating, even though on the first page it described the desk construction as being "as simple as 1-2-3!"

Yeah, well, there's some blatant false advertising for you. All you had to do was flip to the end of the manual to see that it was "as simple as 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36." I guess they just ran out of room when they made their claim.

Yep, there were 36 steps involved in putting the desk together, making me wonder why we paid so much for it since I was the one doing all of the work. It literally took me over two hours before I got to Step 6.

Many long hours later, I finally finished it. I'm proud to say that we now have a fully functional freight locomotive in the house. We're hiring engineers if anyone is interested.