Some Assembly Required Part II

Last December I wrote a post about the joys of assembling toys. It easily could have included a bit about Ikea and their ilk. You haven’t lived until you have tried to follow Olaf’s instructions on how to build something that resembles the piece in the showroom.

I can remember more than one time in which I made plans to fly to Sweden to kick Olaf’s Scandinavian ass. On a side note to the dear troll who is currently hiding here, that was an exaggeration. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe I believe that the Three Billy Goat’s Gruff is a true story. Still, I digress.

The impetus for this post is a birthday gift my daughter received for her birthday. A Dora the Explorer bicycle. It is not the first time that I have had to put a bike together. I know my way around them and I know how to work with tools. I won’t claim to be a master craftsman. A Jack of All Trades is an appropriate description.

So you would think that assembling a small bicycle should be relatively easy. No, no, no. Not this time. This time some jackass had the bright idea of taking the directions and playing with them. The illustrations were so blurry they were useless and the text made as much sense as the following sentence: I truck you backwards ass monkey in love with short man.

I take that back, that last sentence is easier to understand than the instructions. It took a while to get through it, but after a while I figured out that 97w69578905y30 means that they are discussing part x and that it was supposed to go into 9875896t7402 or part y. It really shouldn’t be this hard to build it.

That is 45 minutes of my life I am not going to get back. Not quite as bad as being at a Barry Manilow concert and certainly less painful than setting foot in cleveland or detroit. But, good G-d man. What the hell is wrong with these people. Go take out your perverse pleasures with someone else who appreciates it.

In the meantime the daughter still considers dear old dad to be a hero, which is pretty damn cool. Now if I can wipe her memory clean of all the colorful language I used today just might be close to perfect.