The past 7 days have been incredibly productive for me as I transition from office life to home office life and fulfill my dreams of telecommuting during endless Tivoed episodes of Silver Spoons and 21 Jumpstreet. This has been one of the most disappointing themes of my adulthood, missing all the daytime reruns of my favorite childhood tv shows because I had to sit in a square box eight hours a day in order to pay my cable bill. But now that my paycheck is dependent on me sitting on my couch all day with a computer on my lap, avoiding all signs of human life for the majority of the day while I stare into the oblivion that is the internet, I can listen to the drone of Ricky Stratton in the background and finally feel whole again.
In order to get my home office in working order, I persuaded myself to enforce Extreme Home Makeover laws in my house this past week, which unfortunately meant incurring a long and lonely trip to Ikea on a hot Wednesday afternoon. I needed a dresser, a desk, some shelves and some tables, easy enough since I had it all written down. It would have been a much quicker trip if when picking up the five foot long fold out map to the premises I'd noticed that I'd grabbed the Spanish/Russian version, instead I circled the first two floors in a sweaty panic repeating to myself "Estoy aquí. ¿Donde está aquí?" I donde esta-ed myself for an entire hour before finally realizing it didn't matter if I knew wherever I was going in Ikealand, holy shit aquí I was.
I managed to make it to the self check out warehouse in the bowels of modular furniture hell only two and a half hours after arriving. All I had drawing me to the exit was the smell of meatballs wafting from the cafeteria below me. What kept me there another two hours was the list of 5 pieces of furniture I'd decided to buy in my left hand while my right hand stroked my chin incredulously as I wondered how the fuck I was going to get it all into my car. You see at Ikea, they don't help you with anything, including but not limited to getting furniture off shelves, showing you how to get furniture off the shelves, and holding your flimsy cart steady as you attempt to fill it with heavy boxes of particle board only to shove said cart to the very end of the aisle with the awkward momentum of a single woman about ready to go ape shit on the world because NO ONE IS HELPING HER.
When I did ask a woman in a hideous yellow polo shirt for assistance with at least holding my cart still, she replied by saying, "I guess Tom's on his break, of course." I don't know who the fuck Tom is but at this point I didn't care, all I could think of was shoving meatballs down this woman's throat until she kept my cart from rolling away again. In a polo shirt that ugly there was no way she had a man at home, of course she knew how difficult this was for me!
The dresser I bought, the highest priced dresser at the cheapest furniture distributer on earth, came unassembled with 216 total pieces. Before I even opened the box that I'm sure was made of the same material as its contents, I had two obvious options: 1) hang myself right then and there in my own garage; or 2) assemble the 6 foot high dresser and then hang myself, since I could easily climb atop it to reach the rafters and given my shoddy craftsmanship, I'm sure I wouldn't support my weight. That way, at least I wouldn't have to worry about how to kick the box out from under my feet, I could just cough and let nature take its course as the dresser crashed upon itself below my dangling feet.
Determined to be independent and self-sufficient, I spread out all the pieces in the first box on the garage floor and confidently pulled out the instructions. The instructions that had. No. Words. Just pictures, and bad pictures at that, and I was right then and there totally screwed. I managed to interpret the charades included in the box for some semblance of direction, and muddled my way through 216 pieces for each of the five separate pieces of furniture.
From sunrise to sunset I had traversed the barren wilderness of Swedish particle board alone, and I had come out alive with only two bleeding fingers and a very sore back. At 5:48 that evening, six hours and forty five minutes after I tore through the first cardboard box and dove into an afternoon of loose screws and wooden dowels, I had a 6-drawer dresser standing before me in a wobbly stance of accomplishment. It was a pathetic success, sure, but it was my first success as a single, home office having person who didn't need Tom or anyone else on their break or not to help me through it. That night I was so swelled with pride that I even had people come see what I had done, smiling as they said, "It looks good!"
My only reply was, "Yeah, it looks good! Don't touch it, move away."
