Assembly Required: Fighting to Comprehend an Instruction Manual

When God was handing out mechanical skills to the line of souls about to be born, I must have been off somewhere watching football.  

It's not just that I don't like putting things together. I have a superhuman ability to screw up even the simplest of household projects.  I manage to mangle even things that normal people wouldn't consider worthy of being labeled a household project. I once spent an entire night trying to connect the vent hose to the back of my dryer.  When my weedeater runs out of string, I can never figure out how to replace it, so I just have to buy a new one.

So I had mixed feelings today when I found our new coffee table packaged in a box outside the front door--happy that I would finally have a place to rest my beverage but terrified of having to put the thing together.

I came to need a new coffee table in the usual way.  I accidentally smashed our old one to bits. 

It happened on the night my wife's best friend and nephew were in town for a family wedding and staying with us.  It was late; her friend had gone to bed and her nephew had decided to crash on our couch.  I was wrapping a fitted sheet around the couch's edges when I, myself, stumbled and crashed into our glass-top coffee table. 

It broke into a thousand pieces.

I have partial excuse that our floors are old and uneven and I had been fully participating in the spirit of the festivities all evening, but when the DVD of my greatest moments as a husband gets released, this episode won't make the cut.

Against that backdrop, I felt that assembling the 38 pieces that came today into a functional piece of furniture would be an appropriate punishment for my sins.

My theory on assembling things is that nothing should ever come in more than four pieces.  When it gets beyond that, the little instruction manual that comes in the box with the pieces is useless.  Most of these things, including the one that came in my box today, don't give you any written instructions, just a series of informational diagrams that no normal person can decipher.  

The first diagram is always mishmash of microscopic pictures labeling each of the indistinguishable component part with its own letter.  The second box show them all magically coalescing, and a caption condescendingly telling you to "fits parts together" or some similarly useless directive.  The third shows a the finished product, for the purpose of taunting you.

And this is the best case scenario. 

The worst case is when the manual actually writes out the instructions, and you get helpful tips such as:  "Insert crescent socket into H-nut and rotate using fen screw.  When screw is aft, coagulate block strip adjacent to moop deck."

And that's just step one. 

I keep hoping that eventually, one piece of unassembled furniture will actually arrive with comprehensible instructions. 

That day wasn't today, but I managed to survive nonetheless.  I screwed something up (literally!) early on when the diagram instructed with no further detail to connect three pieces together and I did them in the wrong order. But after about half an hour of my frustration, my wife looked up from across the room and suggested that this might be the problem. Things went smoothly from there.

There's a reasonable chance our new table will fall to pieces the moment I set a book on it, but until then, I'm proud of myself for completing a project like this in less than six months.  And our table even looks like the diagram in the instruction manual. 

But if you ever come over, please don't rest anything too heavy on the surface of the table. It might just break, and I really don't want to face this process again.

We Are God's Cats

I've never directly asked them, but I'm reasonably sure my cats don't understand me.

They don't get why I only feed them one scoop per day, or why I don't let them roam freely outside.  They don't comprehend the idea that household furniture has other uses besides being their scratching posts.  They can't understand why they only get rich, tasty human food on special occasions. 

They can't fathom why I seem leave them for hours a day, why I yell at them when they eat each other's food, or why I hurt them by brushing the knots out of their matted fur.

In their little cat brains, the ideas of rules, vet visits and treats withheld must all seem like senseless punishment.

My cats love me because I love them and provide for them, but they often don't have a clue as to how I operate. 

Sometimes I try to reason with them, but they can't speak my language.  Every now and then a word like "no" or "come" gets through, but they can't discern the nuance of complicated messages. 

They try to communicate back to me, but they just make the same noise over and over again.  Of course, I usually know what they really want, but it would be nice if to hear something new from them every now and then. 

I can tell by their voices and posture when they are scared. I try to comfort them. I tell them that things will be ok, and that I have everything under control. 

I tell them that moving to a new place might be scary, but they'll love it when we get there.  I tell them that their cat carriers might not be comfortable, but that their confinement will just last a little while. I try to explain that the vet visit might hurt a little bit, but the pain is worth it in the long term. 

I say all these things, even though they can't understand. 

Sometimes they seem glad to know that I am there with them, even when they can't grasp what is happening or why.  I wish they could understand me.  I hate to see them suffering.

One cat hisses at me sometimes when I enforce a rule she doesn't like. I'm not threatened by her; I just find her ridiculous.  We both know her life is much better with me in than without, and that she wouldn't last very long in the wilderness. 

One time my cat--aptly named Trouble--broke the rules.  She left the porch and wandered away. It was only a few minutes before she was pawing at the door desperately begging to get back inside.

Another time she hopped into my neighbor's bushes--the ones she always finds so enticing--and she came back with fleas.  She didn't like that experience. Or the ensuing flea treatment. But she's still prone to wandering back to those same bushes if she goes too long without hearing my voice calling her back home.

Our other cat, Sebastian, is a better cat citizen than is his sister.  He's prone to eating things that make him sick, but he's generally more obedient and less likely to steal food, start a fight or wander away.  I don't love him more than his sister, though. While I want my cats to be nice to each other, my love for them isn't based on some kind of merit system. 

I love my cats because they, at some level they can't totally understand, want to live in my house and be my cats.  When they sit in my lap and purr, I forgive their numerous misadventures.  I clean their messes and remove their crap because their companionship is worth it. And sometimes, I like to just sit back and watch them do cat things, like chase bugs around or stretch out in the sun.

When my cats can't understand what I'm doing, sometimes I just have to ask them to trust me.  When they seem unsure, I hope that they'll somehow remember that I've never steered them wrong. 

I'll never be able to explain to them  how I'm different than they are, how they were created, or intricacies of the world beyond our house.

I can't give them everything they want, and they ultimately won't like it if I did.  But if they stay in my house and take what I do give, they'll ultimately have what they need. There will be good times and bad, but we'll go through it all together, and we'll comfort each other until the end.

I don't claim to understand God.  God is at least as far above my understanding as I am above the comprehension of my cats.

But when Heaven looks down on us, I can't help but think that we must look an awful lot like God's cats.

Bad Interview Stories

My wife had a series of job interviews recently.  She had to endure four interviews for a position for which only three candidates were being considered, but she was thrilled to eventually get the job.  Still, the whole episode reminded me of some of the most traumatic moments of my life: job interviews.

The job interview process combines all the worst parts of life into one ball of misery: its where humiliation, desperation, intimidation and frustration combine into one self-esteem bursting heap.

I've had more than my share of bad interviews. 

All of these things actually happened to me:

An elderly attorney asked me four times during a 15-minute interview whether I wanted a peppermint. I'm still not sure if my breath was bad or he was senile. Or possibly both. But I still didn't get the job.

While interviewing with a local firm when I was in law school, I wanted to prove that I planned to stay in town long-term.  I mentioned to the interviewer that I owned my condo and intended to stay there. He argued with me, for at least five minutes, that I couldn't possibly have obtained the financing.

In the same interview, I noticed the interviewer doodling on my resume while I answered one of his questions.  When he saw he was busted, he tried to turn his doodle into a large arrow, but it wasn't really pointing at anything.  I didn't get the job.

An interviewer at a large firm in Birmingham firm told me: "If you don't like racism, you shouldn't live in Birmingham."  And I don't.

At the end of a promising interview with a small firm in New Orleans, the hiring partner told me that she had one more interview scheduled, but the remaining candidate wasn't strong and that she'd be calling me to tell me the job was officially mine next week.  When I hadn't heard back from her in two weeks, I called back. The hiring partner had left the firm, and no one remaining there even knew who I was.  Needless to say, I didn't get hired.

At an interview in Pensacola, I was introduced to a sheepish, overwhelmed-looking attorney with his wrist wrapped tightly in a compression bandage.  When I asked him what happened, he replied, "working here."  Later, he offered me what he termed as "survival tips." 

During the same interview, my car slipped out of gear and slid into the middle of the parking lot, blocking traffic completely. The firm was so starved for help they offered me the job regardless.  But I turned it down.

An interviewer at a firm in Mobile noted that my resume mentioned I had been a sports writer for my college newspaper. He refused to continue the interview until I named 10 Boston Red Sox players. And I could only think of 4 or 5 off the top of my head.

In the same interview, the interviewer noted that the "activities" section of my resume listed I was part of a newly started swing dance club that one of my law school friends had started. He put on music and made me show him the basic steps.  But I still didn't get the job. 

A firm in Cincinnati flew me into town the night before my interview and took me to a nice dinner. All was going perfectly until I spilled the remnants of my second glass of red wine onto my only dress shirt as we got up to leave.  The fancy hotel I was staying at somehow managed to get rid of the stain and have the shirt back to me--perfectly pressed--by 8 the next morning.  I didn't get the job, but I still stay at that hotel every time I'm in Cincinnati. 

In St. Louis, a firm asked me if I could come in for a job interview on a Saturday morning.  I did. I ultimately even got the job.  But it wasn't long before I wished I hadn't.  That Saturday morning thing wasn't a fluke--those turned out to be normal working hours.  The only consolation was that weekends were the only days I got to wear jeans.

I had aced a preliminary interview with a firm in Nashville and was feeling good heading into a meeting with the hiring partner. He saw I was from Alabama and asked if I followed the state's politics. I had a poly sci minor from the state's flagship university and considered my reasonably well versed, so I responded affirmatively. He then proceeded to ask me my thoughts on some ridiculously obscure ethics scandal involving a little-known state judge I'd only vaguely even heard of. The only response I could think of was, "that whole thing is just a mess."

I didn't get the job, but I managed to accidentally sum up the job interview process rather well, I'd say.

Got your own bad interview stories?  Feel free to share them in the comments section, below.