I think we can all agree that the future of the Antarctic Ice Shelf is something we all consider important to all of mankind. And the future of continental shelves everywhere are a constant source of concern for people called marine biologists, whom I can only assume felt the Peace Corps was a bit too patsy and the Coast Guard was too much effort. In general, shelves are fairly important to us, but nowhere is our struggle with their future more apparent to the common man than with those shelves of the laminate wood variety.
Those of us in landlocked states can ignore the continental shelf, as we are not generally concerned with things that are underwater and meant to be that way in the first place. The Antarctic Ice Shelf is a little different because it's on the news a lot and seems to be connected with Al Gore in some way, but still, there seems to be a lot of ice around and we seem to have the hang of making more if we need it.
In stark contrast to these shelf's extraneous relationship to us, the store-bought wood shelf makes an impact on us all at least once, if not more often than that, depending on how well read you are or your attitude towards a carrying a library card and re-learning the Dewey Decimal System. These shelves can turn an otherwise calm day or evening into an exercise of human wit and will against mounting stress and Murphy's Law.
Where's that other piece? Did they even give it to me? Why the hell won't this fit where it's supposed to?
I won't even attempt to answer these questions. Mostly because I don't like the look of that last one.
These shelf projects always start - and end - the same way. You take out all of the pieces. Maybe you arrange them neatly, depending on your proclivities (nice way of saying depending on whether you're OCD or not). Then, it begins.
Things aren't quite fitting together. That one little piece isn't there, so you either leave it out or find some discarded 'extra piece' from a previous project. God forbid you have to call the manufacturer of the shelf to ask them to send you a screw, pin or one of those crazy round things that you quarter turn clockwise to hold this unstable wreck of a furniture piece together.
So, maybe by now you've finished putting the shelf together and you're ready to start putting your first editions up there. Wait ... what happened there? Oh. shit. There's one piece on backwards so that the natural wood veneer that you so painstakingly chose is giving way to plain, disgusting, flaky wood laminate. You can't just take that one piece out, flip it over and be done with it. This thing is together now, and it was a pretty big pain in the ass.
How could this happen? You followed the instructions, so what gives? The answer to this one is surprisingly simple. Shit happens.
No matter how clear the directions are, and they're not always so, you will make at least one mistake putting one of these things together. Maybe you can live with it, or maybe you can't and you have to start over, though I would say that almost no mistake you could make in your right mind in this activity would be worth restarting this process.
This is all starting to sound like some allegory of life, but all I'm trying to say is that, until the majority of us stop fucking up when we try to build modular furniture from IKEA and Target, there is no way in hell we're not gonna fuck up something else too.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment