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.