Spatial Unwareness

In which The Author finally has an office

I told you last time about the Problem of the Time-travelling Parcel. It eventually turned up on the Saturday morning, more by luck than judgement. I had a notification from DPD that it would be delivered 'between 9.30 and 10.30'. That gave me time to nip to the shop before the courier was due. At about 10.10 I heard someone knocking my neighbours' door. Thinking it might be the courier dropping off something there first, I waited for a minute. Then my phone rang. It was the courier, wondering if I was at home. He claimed to have knocked my door and had no answer. Now, if I could hear him knocking two doors down, why didn't I hear him knocking my own door?

He couldn't bring the desk in, of course, because nobody is allowed to go near anyone else at the moment. I couldn't even sign his manifest. Instead, he photographed the parcel in my doorway as proof of delivery. It didn't matter. Even with his help, I probably wouldn't have been able to get it around the awkward angles at the top of the stairs. Instead I opened the packaging in situ and carried the pieces upstairs a bit at a time.

Then I had to assemble it.

As I've noted in a previous entry, words are going out of fashion as well these days. The clock has turned full circle and we've reverted to the dawn of civilisation, using little pictures to communicate. To show you what I mean, here's a page from the 'instruction manual' for the desk. No, it's not from Ikea, but I think it might be from another Scandinavian manufacturer – possibly part of their best-selling Bølux range of office furniture.

I'm glad I spent so much time building Lego, Meccano and Airfix kits when I was young, as this is pretty much meaningless unless you're familiar with their assembly diagrams. I'm also fairly used to assembling flatpack furniture. The manufacturers recommend two people to put it together. (How the fuck can you do that when you're not allowed visitors?) At that point it turned into a question from an old maths exam: if it takes two people one hour to build a desk, how long does it take one person?

The answer is: about three and a half hours.

Admittedly, I wasn't working on it to the exclusion of all else. To begin with, there was the disappointing Tom Clancy reboot The Hunt for Red Screwdriver. After that, there were several breaks to study the instructions again, a couple of reassessments of progress hitherto, a few glasses of squash, several posts on Twitter charting my adventures with the bloody thing, and much swearing. Have you ever come across the type of fixings labelled A and B in the diagram before? I don't know what their proper name is, should you ever feel the urge to buy some from a DIY shop. However, 'bastard fitting' seems to work well – as in 'How the fuck do these bastard fittings work?'

At one point I posted on Twitter:

The desk is half completed. If you're a fan of the bizarre SF/martial arts/espionage/occult TV show Alias you'll know all about Project Christmas. Well, now I know why the CIA didn't recruit me straight from university: no bloody spatial problem solving ability whatsoever.

A little while later, I made another reference to the same mind-bending TV drama:

Also in Alias, the main villain kidnaps an expert in Knot Theory to help him assemble 47 artefacts into an extremely complex machine. It's given me an idea.
If a top-flight mathematician goes missing in the next few days, try my house first. He'll be building a desk.

Anyway, with the evening approaching I completed the desk and vowed never to undertake something like that again without help, or at least a shoulder to cry on. I moved the majority of my style guides and reference books to the desk. The following day I moved my history books as well, and they're now conveniently to hand if I need to check something in a novel. That involved dismantling a bookcase, taking it upstairs in dribs and drabs, and reassembling it in its new home. After this weekend-long flatpack frenzy, you can imagine how I laughed when I watched an episode of the aforementioned Alias a couple of days later, which ends on this touching father-and-daughter bonding moment:

 

And speaking of Alias – my recent adventure with online suppliers and useless couriers continues in the next entry. (You've gotta love a good cliffhanger …