Joining together, falling apart.

The Babylon Bee hit one out of the park again the other day: "Archaeologists Uncover Missing Chapter Of Job Where He Has To Put Together IKEA Furniture":

"We knew the suffering of Job was bad, but had no clue it was this bad until now," said Dr. Philippe Domino, professor of Babylonian Studies at Oxford. The new passage of scripture was found miraculously preserved in a bronze age IKEA catalog. He believes it may have been hidden by Jews during the Babylonian exile.

Many of us find that the more we put furniture together, the more we personally fall to pieces. I note that there is an IKEA app, but to my surprise it is just about shopping. I expected it to have a series of increasingly difficult puzzles followed by an escape-the-room game.

But I don't want to blame everything on IKEA. The crib I was asked to help assemble last month wasn't one of theirs. The friend who called said that the instructions explicitly demanded two people for the job, and his wife wasn't up to being a coequal furniture lifter. He also seemed a little daunted by the instructions. That daunted me, because he's a very smart guy and can handle complex projects. If he was worried, what would I think?

Still, the Guy Code calls on one to act when a brother needs help, so of course I couldn't wait.

The thing is, while all consumer-assembled furniture has its little joys and complications in the instructions, cribs have the highest safety standard of any piece of furniture in the house, for obvious reasons. Only something like a self-assembled oven would be worse.  

I tried to be prepared. I printed out a copy of the assembly instructions before I went over. I read it and made notes. It looked simple enough. But no, like any good puzzle adventure, it had hidden traps that would hold us up as we went. One example: The assembly required three different sizes of bolts, which were packed together and were very close in size. Well, of course we used two bolts that were too short early in the process, and you'd better believe that made a difference down the line when the 1/4-inch-longer bolts wouldn't fit. For another: The assembly was almost entirely connected with barrel nuts, which kept rolling in the wrong direction at the worst possible time. Little things like that required stopping, reconsidering, finding, and fixing on a few occasions. I entered the arena like Tool Man Fred, but left humbled, but wiser. I'm glad no one was drinking beer.

In the end we got it done, and it's a lovely piece, sturdier than my own house, a crib that the great Shecky Weeble himself would applaud. The best part about it is that it converts into a bed, so it will suit the baby until he's ready for high school, I think. I should be up to helping assemble a bed by that point.

And I'm glad IKEA doesn't make pianos. They would call them PJANK and they would be as hard to assemble as a nuclear reactor.