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Zen and the Art of Ikea Furniture Assembly

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I experience a Zen-like calm while assembling Scandinavian-designed shelves and cabinets.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating. But it certainly was pleasant — at least for a while.

Our storage shed at Howard Mesa was in desperate need of some shelves and mouse-proof cabinets.We needed the solution to be cheap.

In a fit of confusion, we’d gone to a Wal-Mart in Prescott and bought some crappy, Chinese-made modular shelves. Of course, we didn’t know they were crappy at the time. Although I hate Wal-Mart and hadn’t stepped foot inside one for more than two years, for some reason we thought we could find what we needed there. After all, Stan raves about the place. Maybe it had changed in two years. It hadn’t. (People say I’m too hard on Wal-Mart but I know I’m not.) And the “furniture” we bought was so poorly made that we brought back all the pieces we hadn’t assembled. We’re still trying to figure out what we’ll do with the three pieces we did put together.

Back to square one.

I was going to try Office Max when Mike suggested Ikea. There’s one down in Tempe, near Phoenix. I didn’t think they’d have what we wanted, but got online to check their catalog. That’s when I found the Träby series of cube-like shelves with optional doors and drawers. We went down to Ikea with the truck to see them in person. They were exactly what we were looking for. And — surprise, surprise — all the pieces we needed were in stock. I loaded up the cart, checked out, and loaded up the truck. Yesterday, at Howard Mesa, I began assembly.

If you’ve never assembled Ikea furniture, you really are missing out on an experience.

First, open the box in which the item’s pieces are packed. You’ll find the box completely filled in with furniture pieces, bag-wrapped hardware, and the minimum number of foam inserts. There’s no wasted space in that box. Since Träby had a natural wood finish, each piece was wrapped in clean, blank newsprint paper.

Now unwrap the hardware and sort it out. There will be pieces you’ve never seen before (unless you’ve assembled Ikea furniture in the past). You might want to sort out the furniture pieces, too. Each one will be slightly different and have tons of holes pre-drilled into it.

Open the instruction booklet. The whole thing is pictures. Line drawings of furniture pieces and hardware with arrows and numbers. In fact, it looks a lot like a coloring book before a kid has gotten to it with crayons. My favorite picture is the one of the man with the pointy nose on the phone; they phone wire is connected to the Ikea store. In words: Call us if you need help.

Next, get your tools ready. You’ll need a philips head screwdriver. That’s it. Okay, sometimes you might need a hammer, but if you do, the hammering job is so light that you can use the heel of your shoe or the handle of the screwdriver.

Now sit on the floor with everything around you. And follow the numbered pictures in the instruction booklet. You’ll screw in weird, tall screws that stick up an inch or more, then stand a panel on top of them and use round do-dads to hold it in place. It’ll be rock solid when you turn the round thing, as if there are ten more screws doing the job. Back panels slide into slots and are held in place with other slots.

What’s amazing about the assembly process is that everything is so incredibly well designed that the pieces can only go together one way. When you’re finished assembling a piece, you feel as if you have performed the final function in a long string of tasks that bring that piece of furniture into existence. You feel as if you’re part of the Ikea team. Like there are a bunch of Europeans nodding their approval at you from across the ocean.

I say Europeans because Ikea is a Scandinavian company and the Träby shelves I bought were made in Poland. The workmanship was quite impressive for such inexpensive furniture. And everything is designed right down to the last screw hole.

The cabinet doors went on just as easily. The only hard part was bending my body in such a way to get the screws into the right pre-drilled holes. The hinges had all kinds of adjustment screws, but I found that if I just used the center setting for each screw, the door hung properly — the first time, every time. Sheesh.

Things changed when it came time to do the drawers. I’d bought two sets of them. Each set had a big drawer and a small drawer. When I opened the box, I got a shock: the drawer insides were lavender. You know. The color. Popular around Easter.

I followed the instructions to assemble the drawers and found that the pieces fit together admirably well. But I hit a snag when I screwed the roller tracks into the cubes I’d already assembled. I kept stripping the screw heads before I could get the screw all the way in.

Now this was weird. I’d been screwing things in all afternoon and hadn’t changed my technique. I hadn’t stripped a single screw up until that point. Now I was stripping the heads on every single screw, unable to get them all the way in. What had changed?

I looked at the box the drawers had come in and saw my answer: Made in China. I guess Poland wasn’t cheap enough for the folks at Ikea headquarters. They’d outsourced to China, like everyone else. The Europeans who’d been nodding their approval were now snickering at me.

I got fed up and stopped only halfway finished with the job. I’ll need Mike to get two of the screws out so I can try again with a fresh set. I’ll go to the hardware store today and buy new screws. Hopefully, they won’t be made in China. Or, if they are, they’ll be made with slightly better quality metal.

Lessons to be learned here? Cheap is cheap for a reason. Even Ikea outsources to China. The best-designed furniture can still be rendered useless by poor-quality hardware.

Today I’ll put together the last shelf cube. With luck, I’ll get that same feeling I had yesterday at the end of all my successful assemblies. But when I feel those Europeans nodding their approval, I’ll ignore them.

As for the Träby shelves and cabinets — they look great and are rock solid.

[posted with ecto]

Ikea, furniture, Poland, China

On the Intelligence of Quotes

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Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

Special CharactersIn Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

AutoFormat as You TypeFortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

Find and ReplaceFirst double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes

The DaVinci Code — The Movie

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Worse than the book?

That’s what the review on Slate said: the movie was worse than the book. I didn’t believe it.

Silly me.

I also poo-pooed Mike’s cousin Ricky, who didn’t want to see the movie because it had only gotten 1-1/2 stars. (I don’t know where he saw that rating.) It couldn’t be that bad, I argued. I’d seen a positive review just that morning on a network news show in our hotel room.

Ricky was stuck with us — he missed his flight on Sunday morning and called us to rescue him from the airport. We dragged him to dim sum in Fort Lee and around New York’s SoHo and south Village — which he seemed to enjoy — and then to the Battery Park Regency 11 Theater for the movie.

A few weird things about this particular theater. First of all, it’s on the 5th (or so) floor of the building. You buy your ticket at street level, then proceed up a series of escalators, one of which takes you at least two floors up. The escalators run along the east side of the building where windows look out — right at Ground Zero. (More on that in another post.)

The movie was boring. It seemed to follow the book pretty closely — I read the book about two years ago, so I don’t remember it perfectly well. What’s weird about the movie is that the book is so widely read that you’d expect everyone in the theater to know the punchline — that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who bore his child after the crucifixion. Yet that punchline wasn’t delivered until more than halfway through the movie. I guess it makes sense because it was probably delivered halfway through the book, too. But when the information was presented in the movie, I felt like saying, “Yeah, and…?” As if there should be more. But there wasn’t.

I think Tom Hanks’s acting capabilities were completely wasted on this movie. There wasn’t much real acting to do. Just deliver the same lines that were in the book — poor dialog to begin with. There was an awful lot of tell rather than show. In the scenes in Teabing’s house, it appeared that Hanks’s character already knew much of what Teabing told Sophie — if that was the case, why didn’t he just tell her before? Of course, this is a book complaint — not a movie complaint — because the movie followed the book. I guess if you make a movie that closely follows a bad book, you’ll end up with a bad movie.

The guy who played Teabing — who also played the bad guy in at least one X-Men movie — did a much better acting job. But I think that’s because his character wasn’t flat and lifeless like the other characters in the book.

Flashbacks were distracting and overused, especially the historic ones. It was like watching a History Channel documentary. You know the kind. Where they get actors to re-enact scenes from history?

I left the movie feeling as if I’d gained nothing from the experience of seeing it.

Ricky said the movie’s music was overpowering. He said that was a sign of a bad movie. I liked the soundtrack, but agree that it sometimes did more work than it should have.

But I wasn’t impressed with the movie at all. It was just a visual representation of what was in the book. And since what was in the book wasn’t anything that needed to be visualized, the movie wasn’t anything special.

Did you see The DaVinci Code? What did you think? Use the Comments link to share your thoughts. I’d be interested in reading what other people who read the book and saw the movie have to say.

Mexican Labor

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Why we need immigrants.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I’ve been sitting on the fence about the immigration issue. But yesterday, something happened that gave me some more food for thought.

The phone company sent a pair of Mexican laborers to my house to do some work.

My house sits on the side of a hill. Between it and the telephone pole that brings service to my house is a large wash (dry river bed that sometimes isn’t dry) and my paved driveway, which curves up a pretty steep hill. There are no overhead wires going to my house. Electricity and telephone service are underground (the way they should be).

When we first moved to our home 10 years ago, Mike and I each had a home office. To handle home, business, and Internet (ISDN in those days) service, we needed six telephone lines. The phone company only had two lines in the conduit that ran under the wash. So they brought in a team of Mexican workers and a ditch-witch to dig a 3-foot-deep trench from the pole, across the wash, up the side of the driveway, and to our telephone box.

This worked fine until my neighbor, while playing with a backhoe in the wash, severed the phone lines. Mike and I spent half the day sitting in the wash under an umbrella, splicing in a new segment of phone line to restore our service. We didn’t want our neighbor to get hit with a bill from the phone company.

I think Mike did severed the lines next. (What is it with men and heavy machinery?) This time we had the phone company come in. We no longer had the offices in the house, so we didn’t need that 6-pair. Could they just use the phone lines in the original conduit? Sure. And they did.

Time passed. Those phone lines went bad. The phone company fixed the line in the wash and routed service through two of those pairs.

More time passed. Now phone service isn’t working reliably again. Sometimes it’ll be fine for days. Other times it’ll have a cracking sound that makes it nearly impossible to use. Once in a while, the lines will be dead. We called the phone company.

It took them about a month to admit that all the lines going to our house were shorted out. They couldn’t find two good pairs of wires in the ten pairs available. They needed to run a new cable.

They sent a guy in to check out the situation. He wanted to run the lines up the back of our property, up a 60° solid rock hill covered with desert vegetation. I was doubtful, worried about erosion in the new trench over time.

Yesterday I stayed home to rest (trying to speed recovery for my surgery). I was filling the hummingbird feeders in the backyard when I spotted the phone company truck trying to zero in on my house. (My house is hard to find and we like it that way.) They visited every house in the neighborhood before they finally climbed up my driveway.

“You finally found us,” I said.

The man in the passenger seat of the truck looked at me blankly and showed me a piece of paper. It was a work order for our home. I looked at him and realized he was Mexican. I looked at the driver. He was Mexican, too.

“Do you speak English?” I asked the passenger.

“A little,” he said.

I looked at the driver. “How about you?”

He laughed. “No Ingles.”

Great.

“I’ll call the phone company,” I said.

They understood that. They parked the truck and I went inside to use the phone, which was working well that day. I finally got through to someone. By that time, the two Mexicans were checking out the side of the driveway, where the old cable was.

“You sent two guys who don’t speak English,” I said. “I think you need to send a supervisor or someone who can communicate with them to make sure they do what the guy who was here yesterday wants them to do.”

A while later, the guy who’d been at my house the day before called. He confirmed with me where he wanted the new line to go. By this time, the Mexicans had shovels out and were digging in various areas alongside my driveway — not where he wanted the line to go. I told him this. “You want to talk to them?” I asked. “Do you speak Spanish?”

He told me he didn’t speak Spanish but he’d call their boss.

By that time, I was pooped. It’s the surgery recovery thing. I’m glad I stayed home yesterday to rest. I went back into the house, closed the windows, and turned the AC on. It was 10:30 AM and already about 85° in the shade.

The Mexicans continued to work. They pulled out their ditch-witch and dug a trench alongside my driveway right where the old trench was. I don’t think they hit the old cable because my telephone service was never interrupted. Around noon, one of them came to ask me to move the cars. We have a parking apron at the top of the driveway that was added after we moved in; they wanted to slice along the concrete seam to sink the wires there. I moved Mike’s truck, his old Mustang, and my Jeep.

I caught sight of their big, orange water bucket, which they’d put on top of my pop-up camper for easy access. Right out in the sun. I know how much I hate warm water, so I asked one of the guys if they wanted some ice for their water. I also offered them the only soda pop we had — diet Coke. (Mike drinks it; not me.) They accepted. I went inside, removed the ice maker’s bucket, put two Cokes on top, and brought it outside. When he opened the water bucket, it only had about 3 inches of water left in it. I dumped in all the ice, then told them to fill it at the hose spiggot at the side of the house. “Take the hose off,” I told them. “The hose water is dirty.” I don’t know if they understood, but I wasn’t about to hang out with them to find out. By this time, I was over 100° in the blazing sun and I wanted to be inside.

But those two guys didn’t seem to care. They worked away in the hot sun for the rest of the day. At one point, I looked outside to see one of them sweeping my driveway. At another point, they were down at the telephone pole digging with shovels. These two guys worked their butts off. I don’t know if they took any breaks or if they had lunch with them. All I know is that they were done by 5 PM and rolling back up the road when Mike got home from work.

Mike and I talked about it later. I told him that I couldn’t imagine any American working as hard as these two guys had worked in the hot sun all day long. “I hope they’re getting paid a decent amount of money,” I added.

“Probably about $15 per hour,” he told me.

Do you know any American laborers who would work like that for that kind of pay?

And therein lies the problem. We (Americans) have come to rely on immigrants for cheap labor. They’re willing and able to work. In fact, they’re eager to work. And they’ll do it for far less than most Americans would consider getting paid, without labor unions, strikes, or unreasonable demands for benefits.

What would happen in we suddenly cut off the inflow of immigrant labor?

What’s the answer to the immigration problem? Damned if I know.

Fan Mail

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Why I find it so embarrassing.

Every once in a while, I get an e-mail message that’s clearly categorizable as fan mail. The messages are usually the same in tone: “I can’t believe how much you’ve accomplished! I try to do some of the things you do and can’t manage to succeed. How do you do it?” The only thing they don’t say is “You’re my idol,” but if you read between the lines sometimes, it’s there.

I’m embarrassed by all this.

I’m a pretty normal person from a pretty average background. Lower middle class parents, not much money in the family. I got my first jobs at age 13: paper route, babysitting, fence painting. Because there weren’t too many things handed to me, I quickly learned that if I wanted something, I had to work to get it. So I did.

(Personally, I think this is why America is doomed. With so many parents handing out things to their kids, kids don’t build healthy work ethics. They’re lazy and unmotivated, concerned more with what they’re wearing than what they’re learning, and someday they’ll be running this country. Hopefully, I’ll be dead by then. But I digress.)

I think the only thing that sets me apart from other people is that I’m driven. I see something I want to achieve and I do what I can to achieve it. I work hard almost all the time. As I finish one project, achieve one goal, I’m thinking of the next.

Back in college, I took a management course where they discussed Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At the top of the pyramid is Self Actualization, the need that must be filled after all others are filled. The trouble is, if you fulfill the need for self actualization, there’s nothing left. So to remain happy, self actualization must always be growing and changing, like a moving target. That’s the way I understood it back in my late teens. And I think that’s what drives me to this day — the need to always have something different to reach for and achieve. I think you can say that I live for challenges.

But are my achievements that incredible? I don’t think so. I admit that I’m fortunate in that I have a good brain and decent health (although the health thing has been a bit questionable lately), but there’s nothing special about me. I’m not a genius. I don’t live on four hours of sleep a night (I wish!). I’m not rich. I just make the most of what life’s dealt me.

People marvel at my achievements as a writer. I’ve written 60+ books and hundreds of articles since 1992. Do you think that’s because I’m the world’s greatest writer? Of course not! It’s because writers generally don’t make much money, so if you want to earn a living as a writer, you have to produce an awful lot. I learned how to work with editors and publishers to deliver what they wanted when they wanted it. My mind has the ability to take a task and break it down into its most basic steps — this is natural to me and I don’t know why. My writing skills make it easy to communicate the steps of a task to readers — my writing skills come from years of reading and writing. I don’t let ego get in the way of delivering what my editors want. By reliably producing year after year, I got into a position where I didn’t have to look for work anymore. It looked for me. I kept producing. And I still keep producing.

People think it’s incredible that I fly a helicopter. It’s not that incredible. It took me a year and a half of part-time lessons, driving 180 miles round trip each lesson day and thousands of dollars, to build my flight time and to get my private helicopter license. That’s not an achievement — it’s perseverance and the willingness to throw large sums of money at what I thought would be a hobby. If I’d quit doing my other work for a while, I could have completed that training in three months. But you’re not independently wealthy or supported by someone with deep pockets, you have to work before you can play. And, for the record, just about anyone can learn to fly. Helicopters aren’t harder to fly than airplanes, either; they’re just different. Anyone who says they’re harder to learn is using that as an excuse for not really trying. Unfortunately, they are more expensive to learn. And that’s usually the stumbling block that stops people from learning.

You want to achieve something? Go out and do it! Stop making excuses, stop procrastinating, and for God’s sake, stop watching crap on television — the eternal time-waster. Only when you dedicate yourself to your goal, fitting each task of its achievement into your regular work and family schedule, can you make it happen.

If you keep at it, the achievement of one goal will surely lead to the next.

And please, stop embarrassing me with fan mail.