Some people see the words “Some assembly required” and consider it a deal-breaker, but for me it’s a challenge.
Especially when it’s two identical gizmos that require assembly, and you can challenge yourself to beat your record time in building the second one.
And, of course, getting them both built without reading the instructions — that little slip of paper that I often use to stanch the flow of blood that inevitably comes with instruction-free assembly.
Of course, when I’m assembling something for somebody else, paid for by their money, I take the high road and follow the directions. Grudgingly.
And not always with better results.
That happened recently when my artist friend Donna asked me to help her assemble a pair of gizmos that Amazon had delivered to her. I eagerly volunteered to build them both myself, rather than robbing myself of the chance to beat my own assembly-time record by building only one.
She agreed, because she suffers from someassemblyrequiredphobia.
The gadgets were a pair of wooden racks, each designed to hold tubes of artist’s paint in three rows of six. Because she has a lot of paint tubes, she needed two racks, which would hold up to 36 paint tubes.
Altogether, each rack was made of about a dozen wooden pieces, with plenty of tabs to be slipped into plenty of slots, along with elastic fastening bands to hold the whole thing together. It would have been a snap to assemble without the instructions, but I was taking the high road on this one. I followed the instructions point by agonizingly obvious point.
From the very beginning to the end.
Step by step.
Resisting the urge to get ahead of myself and go off on my own renegade self.
It was an uncharacteristic display of self-discipline for me. Which, it turns out, was a problem.
As instructions go, these looked pretty good, because it was a single sheet of paper printed on one side with both pictures and words—real words, arranged in patterns that at least approximated English, like: “Slide B (X3) into center A slots” and “slot C (X3) at center & elastics at ends.”
There were five steps altogether, and I had the first gizmo built in no more than ten minutes. Then I raced to build the second gizmo without a glance back at the instructions, and I finished it in record time.
And then, as I cleaned up the packaging to throw it away, I looked at the very last sentence of the instructions. It was a sentence I hadn’t noticed before because it was printed off to the right of the last diagram, at the very bottom of a big blank white space, as if it had been added as an afterthought.
The final sentence said: “The side marked with a corresponding letter should face the bottom or inside of the rack, depending on piece placement.”
I put down the instruction sheet and gazed at the finished paint-rack gizmos I had just built. And there on top of each of the tiered racks was a letter — A, B, or C — displayed so prominently it would be hard to miss, even if the rack were stuffed with paint tubes.
Not too appealing.
Of course, if that last sentence of the instructions had been printed at the very beginning, those assembly-guide letters would have been invisible, on the bottom of the tiers.
As I started disassembling the gizmos to rebuild them according to the last line of the directions, I couldn’t help but remember that episode of “Mash” on TV, when an unexploded bomb landed in the Mash 4077 compound, and Hawkeye had to disarm it with a few basic tools as a timer on the bomb ticked down. Two wires — one red and one white — led from the timer to the detonator.
“Cut… the red… wire,” Colonel Blake called out, reading the bomb-disabling directions in a no-nonsense voice while hiding behind a blast shield.
And as Hawkeye slipped the wire cutter over the red wire and started squeezing the snippers, the Colonel read the next line of instructions: “But first….”
That line surely got a big laugh all across America, because everybody has a story about those maddening instructions that wait until it’s too late to tell you….
I was halfway through gizmo-reassembly with a Mash-memory smile on my face when I took a closer look at those A’s and B’s and C’s that were causing me such a headache and rendering my record-breaking construction time moot.
And I realized that each of those letters, so unappealing right there in plain sight, were just little pieces of lettered tape stuck to each part. Rather than worrying about which side of each piece was facing upwards and disassembling and reassembling gizmos according to late-breaking instructions, I could just peel the little tabs off in a second or two.
Now that would have been a handy tidbit of information to include for a mook like me who actually followed the damn directions for once.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
