How To Put Furniture Together

So you've bought a desk, entertainment center, or other piece of furniture, which comes in a box and requires assembly! Congratulations, you've just won a free trip to Mordor.

Below are some stages typical of the building process.

1. Avoid the task as long as humanly possible.
2. Moan and groan about having to do it.
3. Start going through the pieces, laying them out in an organized manner.
4. Experience an overwhelming sense of dread brought on by the great number of pieces you have to put together.
5. Possibly discover that pieces aren't labelled, are missing, or the furniture had been bought before and returned to the store because of broken pieces. Or that your pre-drilled holes were over-drilled, and it's too wide or long to properly fit the piece that goes in it. 
6. If you got this far without discovering it can't be put together, begin misery of assembly.
7. Be confused by the instructions and get angry because things aren't properly explained.
   
8. You and whoever is helping you proceed to take out your frustration by snapping at each other. "No, you're doing it wrong! It says it's this way in the instructions!" "No, this side goes here!" "Are you insane?!"
9. After attaching a piece, discover it's on the wrong way. Depending on how piece is attached, this may involve trying to remove nails, or breaking dowels when you have no extras. Or if you're lucky, you only have to remove a few screws.
   
10. Try to 'easily slide' a piece on, shimmying and angling it in an attempt to put it on without breaking it.
11. Strip some of the screws.
12. Declare that after this, you're never going to buy something you have to assemble. This is ridiculous, and nearly impossible.
13. After putting most of it together, the next step involves turning the piece over to put the backing on. But the furniture now weighs 500 lbs, and there's no way you can do it.
14. If you and helpers are all female, bemoan that guys are naturally stronger than girls, and it's not fair that you're struggling with something the same amount of men could do with ease.
15. Abandon task until you have more people to help you.
16. Once furniture is standing up, procrastinate for weeks.
17. Whinge and whine about how you have to finish it.
18. Discover there's eight hundred nails in the next step.
19. Have trouble getting the nails into the wood. Proceed to drop them repeatedly, wonder if the nail will ever go in, and smash your fingers and thumbs with the hammer.
20. Argue with nails that are determined to be crooked. When trying to straighten them, knock the nail out and onto the floor again. To maximize torture, hammer one nail so crooked the tip goes through the side.
    
21. Realize why the instructions wanted you to lay it on its side instead of standing it up, because it makes for an awkward angle to hammer nails in from.
22. Give the nails names, like Jerk, Butt-brain, and Bane of My Existence.
23. Invent songs describing your feelings. Example: "Oh how I hate this thing, oh how I hate this thing, I really hate this thiiiing!"
24. After the long process of putting the backing on, decide you're finished for the day because... after all that hammering and all those crooked nails, you're just done.
25. Avoid finishing the job for a while longer.
26. Learn that your mother didn't want the doors put on, so you can skip that step. Then discover all you have left is to put the shelves in, which basically consists of sticking the pegs into pre-drilled holes and setting the shelves on them. So, at long last, you've completed the dreaded task.

Considering how Mom and I snapped at each other during some of our projects, and how my friend and I griped at each other throughout the long process of assembling the entertainment center, I can start to imagine this scenario.

And that, my friends, is how you assemble furniture. It doesn't even have to be from Ikea; any old box labelled 'put it together, my dear victim... muahaha' will do. You can pick them up at department stores, yard sales held by insane asylums (after hours of struggling, you start to go mad), and from the piles of broken particleboard that an angry-looking man just threw into the town dump with a scream of "Good riddance!"

But if you'll excuse me, the men with giant butterfly nets just arrived. They say they have a padded room with a view for me to stay in, and promise there are no things for me to assemble or disassemble there. Sounds like the vacation of my dreams.
Until next time, folks.