Flat Pack Farce

I vowed that when I moved house this time, I would not buy any flat packed furniture. ( especially from Ikea) I have had terrible experiences before and I am one of those people, I’m not ashamed to admit, that once the bookcase or table or wardrobe is proudly erected, I always have a screw or a nut or a bolt left over and no matter how long I look I can never find where it was supposed to go. I’ve never had anything fall over or fall apart on me (yet) but there is almost always a piece left over. I’m actually beginning to think that it is a conspiracy by the flat pack packers (say that three times fast) and they put in extra pieces in the box just to bamboozle you.

 My last and hopefully final experience of a flat pack nightmare was about 10 years ago and involved the dreaded Ikea shelving which, if you’d seen them you would screamed at me “OMG woman are you completely incompetent?” Hey! I am mostly a capable woman but these things were obviously designed by some psychotic freak on acid. Seriously! They weren’t flat packed in the traditional sense of the word but they still had to be constructed. They basically consisted of tubular black supports and wooden shelves which slotted on. I swear it was like wrestling a metal octopus. I was tempted to go purchase body armour just in case I accidently impaled myself. At one point I nearly lost an eye! This somewhat simple erection still had me flummoxed and after over an hour of grappling with the pieces, I called up the boyfriend and swore down the phone at him that there were obviously some fucking pieces missing (even though I was holding the worlds large back of screws)and that I was about to throw the whole thing out of the fucking window. Needless to say when he came round that evening he had the damn things up in less than 20 minutes and I was more than a little embarrassed.

 I’m gonna be completely sexist now and say that women, or at least women like me just aren’t cut out for this kinda construction. Maybe our basic natures fight against our want of being equal and our need to erect flat packed furniture. Women after all are the home makers and nurturers. Or perhaps we are just more clever than that and know that our man’s need to be hunter gatherer and construction expert is important to him and by rescuing their damsel from the evil that is flat packed furniture we build his sense of worth.

 So I’m pleased to say that so far the urge to buy flat packed, even if it’s gonna save me some money has been quashed by the memory of the Ikea shelving incident of 2002.