Of all the possible ways there might be to build a piece of Ikea furniture, there is only one correct way. Like pockmarked two-lane blacktop, there are plenty of demoralizing instruction-reading and brain-teasing, spatially-challenging pitfalls on the path to discover that One Correct Way.
I judge the quality of the assembly job by how many parts are left over afterwards. Each piece of Ikea hardware is inevitably an exotic, one-of-a-kind design, fasteners otherwise appearing only on a Mars lunar rover.
This time there was one ungainly fastener with a screw head, a swiveling joint in the middle, ending with a bulbous protrusion that looked like a spare part from a Triceratops. So whatever would I do with this extra shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter thing? Humph! I wondered how much of my money they had wasted by mistakenly enclosing this surplus part in my furniture kit!
Then it dawned on me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had this shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter left over! Maybe this was a vital part that I should have installed in my prized construction—had I suffered a concentration lapse and lost my way through the instructional pictographs? I feared this piece of dinosauric-appearing hardware—now missing from my construction—might render my piece of furniture too dangerous to use, an oversight that might cause a painful finger pinch or even a fatal collapse upon a favorite family pet!
Search as I might through the booklet of instructions, there was no hope of finding where the missing part belonged.
And there was no doubt what had to be done.
Retrieving a generous length of rope from the garage, I lashed my assembled furniture with the cord, first lengthwise, then sideways, then diagonally. I yanked and knotted the rope tight so there was no possibility that the omission of the missing part could cause bodily harm.
As I lashed down the final ungainly cord while on my belly beneath the chest of drawers, I noticed a hole. It was a hole designed to perfectly fit the missing shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter, which now lay uselessly upon the assembly instructions. The blood drained first from my head, then from my limbs. I would have to disassemble the entire piece of furniture to insert the missing part.
There was no way I would do that.
Upon returning the still rope-trussed furniture to Ikea the next day, the salesperson asked for the reason for its return.
“Defective,” I answered in a word.
“I’m sorry,” the salesperson responded, thinking I was referring to the furniture.
“Defective,” I repeated, not bothering to tell her that I was referring not to the furniture.
Instead, I was referring to myself.