Urge to kill rising...

This post is pretty much written in code, but anyone who has had to assemble furniture may recognize pieces of it. The last thing I want to do is run down the fine American employees of a fine US juvenile furniture manufacturer, so I'm not going to name the company I'm talking about.


I started assembling a changing table two days ago. At this point, I'm wishing I'd taken on an easier task, like maybe the Boston Marathon, or Everest. I'm not the handiest guy on Earth, but I've put together quite a bit of the furniture in our house; I'm an old hand with a screwdriver and an allen wrench, so nothing in the instructions seemed difficult.

In practice, however, I found myself dealing with instructions like "Tighten the four screws securely because you're about to cover them up, making them inaccessible forever," followed immediately by "bend outward the panels you just screwed in securely, taking care not to TEAR THE TABLE APART ENTIRELY."

There are eight connectors, called "cam locks" in the instructions, that appear to be responsible for holding together the entire apparatus. I screwed in the connectors they lock into, carefully bent the sides apart without breaking them, put the shelf in place, and turned the cam locks...and instead of locking, they spun freely. Uh....huh?

Some quick examination revealed that the connectors weren't long enough to reach into the cam locks. So I bent the sides apart again to pull the shelf out, loosened them what seemed an appropriate amount, carefully put the shelf in place to check the placement of the connectors (making sure they were unscrewed far enough for the locks to engage.

...I carefully bent the sides apart without breaking them, put the shelf in place, and turned the cam locks...and instead of locking, they spun freely. Uh....huh?

Some quick examination revealed that the connectors weren't long enough to reach into the cam locks. So I bent the sides apart again to pull the shelf out, loosened them what seemed an appropriate amount, carefully put the shelf in place to check the placement of the connectors (making sure they were unscrewed far enough for the locks to engage.

[Hey, John, you just repeated the last two paragraphs. Yes, I did, because THAT'S HOW IT FUCKING HAPPENED. If I wanted to be more accurate, I would've repeated them FOUR TIMES.]

So the fourth time I had to bend apart the sides, it started to seem that they weren't as solid as they were when I first screwed them in. No problem, I figured that when the locks finally engaged they would hold everything together.

So I went to tighten the shelf -- two of the locks engaged correctly! Huzzah! The third one tightened...and then suddenly went loose. Oh, that can't be good. The fourth was still completely loose.

So I pulled the shelf back out, yet again, to find a bent connector, a "cam lock" in two pieces, and the sides of the table looser still, after another bending. I briefly considered that having 7/8 of the connectors in place would probably be plenty...then I thought about my wife's reaction to gaps between the shelves and sides of the table...and asked myself whether I would really be happy with the idea of my kids being "7/8ths supported" by this table.

So I put everything aside to start on the crib. And as I was stacking the vast amounts of styrofoam and plastic packing material in the corner of the baby's room to make way for the crib...what should drop out of the bottom of the box, but a folded-up half-sheet of typing paper, crushed in the bottom of the box.

I unfolded the sheet, to find an "Instructional Addendum." This addendum let me know that I shouldn't screw in the cam lock connectors to the stopping point, but only to an arbitrary point on the shaft; otherwise the cam locks would not engage properly, and "breakage will occur." Huh. Good thing I didn't know this ahead of time. Good thing this fine manufacturer didn't build their threads to an idiot-proof level of precision that could've prevented the problem. And it's a good thing they didn't spend the 5 minutes to put the "Instructional addendum" in the plastic bag with the rest of the instructions.

Because if they'd done all that, I'd have a fucking changing table in the nursery by now, instead of a pile of fine wood and wood veneers.

SO today I figure I get to order new hardware, and wait 3 weeks for it to arrive, hoping the hardware gets here before the baby. The good news is the crib only involves nuts and bolts, and it's about 50% done already.

So, as I said at the beginning, I have no desire to run down the fine American employees of a fine US juvenile furniture manufacturer...but to address them, and their shoddy connectors, variably threaded screws, and shoved-in-the-bottom-of-the-box "Addendum" for one moment...do you all maybe THINK THIS SORT OF LAZY SHIT MIGHT BE A TEENSY PART OF THE REASON WHY WE'RE ALL BUYING OUR FURNITURE FROM THE SWEDES THESE DAYS?! YOU'RE GETTING YOUR ASSES KICKED BY FUCKING SOCIALISTS!

Ahhh. That's better...