Assembly Required

Every once in a while, life has a way of giving you Before and After pictures. Yesterday was one of them.

You see we bought a new stand for our TV and it required assembly, so for what seemed like hours we were working together trying to make sure that the screw we were using to attach the shelves was in fact Screw A6 and not A4. We weren't doing too badly. Unlike my previous assembly attempts, holes lined up, screws fit, the front bit wasn't facing the rear, etc. All went smoothly, that is, until the final bit, which required putting the glass shelves on.

Up until that last step, we were able to sit or stand and just attach things by turning the stand on its side. But once the glass shelves were on, it was too heavy so we had to get on the floor to finish off the job by putting in the final six screws for the top shelf.

I can hear Linda saying, "What's this 'We', Gimpy Man?" for my knee doesn't like ground level. So LK volunteered to kneel down and put in the last screws. And of course, as if there is some divine law that no self-assembly can ever go smoothly, that was when things didn't line up properly and the last two screws wouldn't go in properly. Linda was trying her best, but I decided I was just the man for the job. So knee be damned, and down to the floor I went, too.

Of course, I had no more luck than Linda, but that didn't turn out to matter so much in the end. For within a few minutes, virtually simultaneously, pain struck both of us. Linda got a cramp in her foot and began doing a reasonably good impression of a python trying to catch a ferret.

But I wasn't paying much attention for at precisely the same moment, my knee felt as if various parts of it were snapping loose from whatever holds them in place and they were now spewing hot flames down my leg. I needed to stand up promptly, but of course I couldn't just do that because my knee no longer believes in practicing straightforward standing up.

So while Linda is slithering in one direction, I'm scooting across the carpet like a dog with a bad case of worms until I can reach the couch and use its arm to drag myself up. The good news - neither her foot nor my knee seemed to have come out with longer term problems from the moment. The better news - no one was filming us. The best news - we decided we would finish next day and have drinks now instead.

We'll find out today whether the stand will hold the TV without two of the screws in it. I'm pretty sure it will. In the meantime, I can't get past remembering some of our more passionate times when we were first together - that's the Before picture. The After is what happens now when we get down on the carpet for an entirely different type of screwing.