To a man, the scariest words
Some phrases strike fear in men’s hearts – ‘‘Caution: Tarantulas!’’ say, or ‘‘Can I offer you a sherry?’’ But the worst by far, the phrase at which grown men falter and their spines buckle, is ‘‘some assembly required’’.
Needing a desk for my study, I took myself off to a showroom where I discovered one called Hamilton. I didn’t know whether the desk got its name from the American statesman, the inventor of the jet boat or the vibrant North Island metropolis, but neither did I care. The thing was cheap.
Between the idea and the reality, wrote dear old T S Eliot, falls the shadow. The idea of the Hamilton desk stood on the showroom floor, sturdy and traditional, with drawers.
The reality consisted of a pair of flat packs that the manager helped load into the back of my car. ‘‘Good luck,’’ she said, as I drove away. It was the shadow speaking.
The further I drove from the showroom the more the shadow fell. I remembered previous experiences of assembling kitset furniture. Back home I stashed the boxes against the garage wall and avoided their gaze for the rest of the week.
But eventually the time came as it always does, and I slit open the flat packs with a Stanley knife and a sense of foreboding. First out was a sack of fixings – screws, dowels, clips and things I could not put a name or purpose to, all as numerous as grains of sand on a beach. With a caution born of experience I tipped them onto a tray and separated them into little piles by type.
There followed the bits of desk. Each had a one-millimetre layer of wood-finish laminate. This veneer was the idea.
The reality was the 20mm of underlying particle board that looked like compressed breakfast cereal. Some of the bits of particle board had little stickers on them, identifying them as Piece B or whatever. Others had shed their little stickers, which now lay in the bottom of the box alongside my courage.
According to the instruction manual the approximate time required to assemble the desk was an hour and a half. By a remarkable coincidence this was exactly the time I had spent sorting the fixings into piles and gawping at the pieces of desk.
Nevertheless, the instructions began promisingly with illustrations of the only tools required: a screwdriver and a mallet. A mallet has always been my tool of first resort, but I had never before seen one officially advised.
Most scholars agree that writing began with drawings. Over time these drawings became pictograms, divorced from what they originally represented, and eventually they morphed into letters representing sounds. And from letters words could be formed to express ideas too complex for any drawing to convey.
Flat pack manufacturers have reversed that evolutionary process. They have gone back to conveying instructions by drawing them, creating a visual language that people of all cultures everywhere can be equally baffled by.
Still, I was in need of a desk and I went at it. There were mishaps – especially the transferred sticker that led to the confusion of Piece T with Piece V and some serious mallet work – but gradually the desk took shape beneath my hands. And six hours later I was proudly patting my Hamilton and running its little drawers in and out.
‘‘Built it myself,’’ I’d exclaim blithely to anyone who’d listen, without acknowledging to them or to myself that eight hours earlier I’d been scared of it. Ah men.