Go Make Your Bed

A few days ago, I decided I'd had enough of the creaky old bed in my apartment, so I went to IKEA and bought a bed. Last night, after a very long day at work, I set about putting it together. While it didn't quite reach "mouse-A-sees-cheese-B" territory *, the assembly instructions were surprisingly complex for what I thought should be a relatively straightforward object.

Around 2am, tired and bleary-eyed, I arrived at the last step—all had to do was attach two metal ratchety thingamabobs to the frame with a couple of screws, and I'd be done. It was right about then that I noticed the parts wouldn't fit as drawn; I'd mounted one of them upside down, resulting in a frame that could collapse when released, instead of staying open the way it was designed to (so that you could get at the storage space inside). Assuming I'd simply been careless or inattentive because I was so tired, I just left the part off, closed the frame manually, and went to sleep. I figured I could just fix it in the morning.

After a good night's rest on my nice new bed, I carefully looked again at the instructions to see where I had goofed. To my amazement, I found that I had followed the steps correctly to the letter—one of the diagrams had actually been drawn upside down.

Given the amazing amount of engineering that goes into packaging most IKEA products, this was hugely surprising to me. How this mistake got past their quality assurance testers is also a mystery. Oh, well. At least I feel a little better about my ability to follow instructions. I had to disassemble the bed partway to fix the problem, but it works now.

IKEA: bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "go make your bed."

* For a real-life example, check out the incredible Honda ad. Yes, it's real. Aside from one "join" about halfway through, the whole thing was done without any camera tricks. Rube Goldberg would have been proud.