Published 12:55 28/04/10
If I ever buy another piece of flat-packed furniture you have my permission to shoot me.
Do it as humanely as possible, I’m not overly masochistic!!
DIY is bad enough, but these last few days have been nothing short of life threatening.
Forget the actual building of the furniture for the time being, just getting the stuff delivered is hassle enough.
“Yes, sir, we shall deliver it sometime between the hours of 7.30am and 1pm between Monday and Wednesday!”
And I’m only semi-joking.
Once the items actually pass over your threshold, new problems arise at every turn.
You open the boxes to be greeted by 6,000 different bits of wood, 22,000 screws, etc, and a hundred kilos of polystyrene and packaging.
After wading through the things you don’t need you finally reach the instructions…. in Greek, Danish, French, German and, somewhere written on the back of a postage stamp size piece of paper; English.
Of course, the drawings that go alongside the writing are of a good size – typically because they have been drawn by a three-year-old…. with learning difficulties!!
So, you’ve laid out all your pieces of wood and marked them off.
Then you have to check off all the nuts, bolts, screws, cam-locks and goodness knows what else.
I did that 5,995, 5,996, 5,997 and 5,998.
There was only one thing for it.
I phoned the help-line.
After realising there was nothing too much The Samaritans could do for me, I phoned the Customer Care line.
They cared so much that they let me speak to three different people before finally transferring me to a person with any semblance of intelligence, or grasp of the English language.
I was two cam-locks short.
The lady said she’d check the spare parts department.
I told her I said cam-locks, not cam-belts!
They were out of stock.
She said she could re-order my delivery.
She was willing to courier four massive boxes to me for two items roughly half an inch across.
And we wonder why this country is going down the toilet.
As I somehow managed to regain consciousness I heard the lady tell me I could open the boxes, take out the bag of screws and send the rest back.
“Why can you not do this at the depot, put them in the post and send them first class to me?”
Apparently, I had started speaking Swahili – either that or the computer in front of her wasn’t telling her what to do!!
The simplest of solutions is sometimes so difficult for people to grasp.
I agreed to take delivery of another four large boxes.
Yes, of course, so long as I was able to wait in my house for three days straight. Just in case when I went to pick the kids up from school, the couriers turned up, and buggered straight off again!!
As I considered suffocating myself in a pile of polystyrene I had a brainwave.
Over the years I’ve had numerous flat-packed items of furniture and I always save the leftovers. I put it down to my hoarding addiction. If you’ve seen the clothes I wear it will become hopelessly apparent that I throw nothing away!!
“Eureka!” I cried from the depths of my garage at 10pm (don’t worry the neighbours are used to my foibles), as I scrambled out with a cam-belt and two cam-locks.
The furniture could be built.
Luckily, my mum and dad were down, left them to it, popped a beer and switched on MOTD.
Just leaves me with one minor irritation.
So, if there’s anyone out there who fancies a free chest of drawers and vanity unit suitable for a seven-year-old girl, give me a shout.
All you’ve got to do is come and sit in my house for 72 hours straight!!
Starting tomorrow: Don’t miss Matt’s daily blogs in the build-up to Sunday’s massive relegation decider between Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace
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