Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Some Assembly Required

I live in an abnormal household. Well, I suppose we are abnormal for many reasons but I will expose you to only one in this post. We recently bought some new furniture for our office: a computer desk and two bookcases. They came in pieces. You think that's a bad thing, but, see, this is where we're abnormal: We love this stuff. At times, my husband and I have actually argued over who was going to put something together. Other times I've assembled things before he's had a chance to in the name of being "helpful." I love to assemble things quickly. He loves to assemble things correctly. This difference only caused a few problems for us this time.
First of all, we were at about step 12 of 28 when I picked up a portion of the desk to get it into position and didn't give it the support it needed, ripping the particle board at the places it had been connected. Ouch. It looked bad. But not to worry, with his cordless drill and bottle of Gorilla glue attached to his duct tape belt, ThismightworkMan (my husband's new superhero name) arrived on the scene! In no time he had the sub-assembly back in order. The next problem we encountered was a shortage of screws. This desk literally had 15 different types and sizes of screws and bolts. I sorted and organized them so they would be easy to find at each step. But we were missing two of one type. No problem-- not for ThismightworkMan who found a spare screw with smaller head and a washer to work for one replacement. For the other missing screw he used his favorite special power (air compressor + cutoff wheel) to shorten a spare screw that was the right size but too long. Finally we had all the pieces assembled! We slid the file-sized drawer into its opening. Why wouldn't it close? It was stuck on something. Something on the sides of the drawer weren't allowing it to close properly. The screws holding the slides on the drawer were getting caught because...you guessed it: They were the missing screws! But would ThismightworkMan be thrown by such a discovery? Of course not! With some smaller spare screws and a few drops of Gorilla Glue he had the entire desk together and working as if his silly wife had never touched it. If you're out there ThismightworkMan... Thank You!!!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words. However, I take exception to my new name. I suggest ThiswillworkMan. ThismightworkMan sounds as if my fixes are cheap and questionable in quality. I believe any fix I do meets and normally exceeds the quality of the original. For instance on one of the desk fixes you mentioned not only did I repair the two connections that broke I added an additional two connections that were not part of the original. Some may say that is overkill, but you see, that is the type of work I do. I want things to be even better after I am done with them. That is why I believe ThiswillworkMan is more suitable. Also, I would like to say thanks for your help putting the furniture together. Also, thanks for giving me a reason to break out the air-tools.

Cheri said...

Phew! Gabe will be happy to hear that we can wait a while before having our next child. After the assembly of our crib, we decided that we can never disassemble it... which means that we must always have a baby in the house. Do you think that thiswillworkman will come this far? Does he know the way? Will he assemble non-office related furniture?

Anonymous said...

I am married to Thiswillworkman's cousin, ICanBuildThatMan! Forget buying the pieces and assembling them. He just looks at the piece, sees how its made and then decides he can build it better and cheaper himself!

Kudos to Sara for knowing the actual names of the "superhero support" tools!

Anonymous said...

I am always happy to hear that my 'cousin' thiswillworkman and all my other home improvement superhero brethren are still mightily fighting the good fight.

We all took a solemn vow to make things better, stronger, faster.
Isn't that why we have attracted the women we have?