Curse of the Dowels

My mother and I went to the store awhile back and decided we would buy a TV stand and a desk. Seems simple and harmless enough, right?

Wrong!

Days later, a man was going to come by to set up the TV and internet service. We planned to put together the desk in Mom's room and set up her computer on it. We would also put together the TV stand and set up the television in the living room. So we got started.

The desk involved putting the dowels into the holes and gluing them in place. So we did that, pounding the boards to make sure the dowels went all the way in. We were making terrific progress... that is, until Mom realized one of the boards was in wrong, so the holes for the shelf were on the wrong side. That meant we had to (shudder) remove the board. We pulled, and we pulled... and the board came free, with two dowels remaining in one piece and the third dowel still attached to the other. Of course, we had to pull out another dowel before we could turn it around and put it back together correctly. The dowel Mom pulled then broke, with half of it remaining in the hole, and the other half splitting in two pieces.

"Great." Mom said. "So that means we'll have to ream out the dowel, get a new dowel to replace it..."

So that project came to a grinding halt.

No matter. We'd just start on the TV stand. It consisted of about five thousand pieces, and by my estimation, would take about a hour or eighty to complete.

So we began putting it together, and all was well until we had to put the dowels into boards so-and-so and what's-it. The dowel went all the way into the hole, and Mom had to waste a perfectly good piece of gum to remove it. A terrible tragedy in Mom's world, losing a beloved piece of Bubble Yum. It turned out the dowels went in all the way on all the holes on those boards, meaning that they either gave us the wrong-sized dowels or over-drilled the holes (I suspect the latter).

And then that project came to a grinding halt.

Later on, the man arrived to set up the internet, TV, and phone service. All we had succeeded in that day, in all our hours of work, was putting a small TV on Mom's dresser, and making big piles of boards and partially-constructed furniture.

"We tried to get ready for you." I told the man. "We really did."

If anyone asks, it was the dowels. They're the contributing factor in all of this. We're cursed.