Many of us have learned to dread the phrase, “some assembly required.” That is to say, plenty of us know the profound frustration of trying to put something together despite badly written instructions.
How many adult exclamations did my kids learn as I struggled to build a desk, end table, or light fixture using the cryptic guidelines that came in the box packed solidly with poorly marked parts? How many Christmas Eve memories are indelibly etched with intense annoyance at my inability to construct a simple children's play set?
Many of us have learned to dread the phrase, “some assembly required.” That is to say, plenty of us know the profound frustration of trying to put something together despite badly written instructions.
How many adult exclamations did my kids learn as I struggled to build a desk, end table, or light fixture using the cryptic guidelines that came in the box packed solidly with poorly marked parts? How many Christmas Eve memories are indelibly etched with intense annoyance at my inability to construct a simple children's play set?
The instructions themselves are the problem. It often seems that small packet of directions, provided in multiple languages, was originally written in some other idiom. It was then translated into the native tongue of the country where the product was manufactured, and then interpreted one final time by linguists with a less-than-perfect command of the tongue I speak.
The baffling ambiguity of these instructions (“It is helpful to be more than two people for assembly of this product”) is made more bemusing by the included pictographs. Somehow I am supposed to understand the inconsistent gesticulations of those stick figures, or why those arrows are curving toward indecipherably tiny drawings of essential parts at the end of dotted lines that mark the inadequately inked diagrams splayed across every page.
And how often have we tried to put something together only to find crucial hardware components missing? One may curse, swear, or jump up and down, but that will not make anyone available to speak to you at the 800 number. Even if they were, the omitted parts will not be delivered for days.
That's why I must salute the anonymous makers of shelf units I recently put together. My experience in this “assembly required” venture was surprisingly satisfying.
These free-standing shelves came with minimal step-by-step guidelines. The illustrations featured no feebly rendered graphics of life-sized hardware included, nor vague depictions of parts coming together in seemingly impossible ways.
What is more, the workers in the foreign factory where these shelves were fabricated clearly paid attention to what was going in the boxes. That is, they made sure every necessary piece of shelving and hardware was included, then took the time to confirm the pieces fit together. Let me explain.
Each corner post for these shelves came in two sections. The shorter section featured a female threaded pipe end that screwed onto the male threaded end of the longer piece. On one set of shelves, however, I discovered one of the shorter corner pipe sections with the opposite threading arrangement.
“Oh, fiddle,” I thought to myself, “am I the victim of lousy quality control at the shelving factory?”
Happily, the corresponding longer corner pipe section was also fabricated with a reverse orientation in threading. My shelves were completed, and storage organization ensued.
It would seem there are workers in far-away places who really do give a damn. Guess I can no longer assume “some assembly required” necessarily means trouble.
Pat Grimes, a former South Bay resident, writes from Ypsilanti, Mich. He can be reached at pgwriter@inbox.com
