“Getting things done around here is like mating elephants. It’s done at a very high level. It’s accomplished with a great deal of bellowing and it takes two years for anything to be produced.”

 

Remember that sign? It used to hang around office cubicles a few years back.

 

I never knew how true it was, though, until the past couple of nights.

 

No, the nights did not involve mating of any kind.

 

They did, however, involve the worst thing you can bring upon yourself. Worse than grocery shopping with hungry toddlers. Worse than moving. Even worse than helping someone else move.

 

It’s that bad. I almost can’t say it.

 

It involves assembling a piece of furniture.

 

Yes, it involves taking a box with roughly the same dimensions of an interstate billboard, and with the average weight of the aforementioned elephants, and turning 38 pieces of wood, 2,728 screws, cam bolts, and dowels into a piece of working furniture, using instructions written by someone for whom English is almost certainly a second language.

See, this is one of the sacrifices a parent has to make. Miss Priss wanted this bed. We went from furniture store to furniture store, looking at bed after bed. We looked at beds that could easily be delivered by a big truck and assembled by a couple fellas that do. This. All. Day. Long. REAL furniture. But no. She liked a bed that comes in a box.

So. Armed with the required tools (and rejecting their sorry excuse for an Allen wrench), we went to work. The instructions said, “two hour assembly time.”

It took two hours just to sort the effin’ hardware.

And let me tell you, we’re no slouches. Mr. Nerd is quite the handyman, and we have done most of our repairs, including the renovation of an old house top-to-bottom, by ourselves. We can handle most projects.

But this one kicked our collective butts.

So tonight, we move to Round 3 of the “two hour assembly”. And we will attempt to do it without the aforementioned “great deal of bellowing”.

 

Someone hold me.