Bleeding hands....

A weekend of pain, and no pleasure - A rare experience for me.

I assembled the new Ikea (hack, cough, spit, and other tourettes sounds) desk, and drawer unit (which incidentally was of the lowest possible quality, was cracked, split and generally poor - but I would not dare to venture back there to have another day stolen from me whilst trying to get a replacement panel).

I got out my new (from Staples - whose failure to carry any decent desks in the first place, which resulted in my miserable trip to Ikea on Saturday) office chair, and began the assembly. It was a tricky job with silly "allen key" bolts. Approximately four bolts from completion, one of them refused to go in. I tugged a little bit too hard, and "ping" - the thermometer reached the top like you've seen in so many Tom and Jerry cartoons before, and the glass shattered, pouring molten lava everywhere, as the bolt sheered clean in two.

A nice shiny silver peg was left laughing at me, embedded in the base of the chair, with no way in and no way out. Of course, it had taken me so long to assemble all this two-bit furniture, that the shop was closed and there was nothing I could do.

My office would not be complete on Saturday.

For light relief (I can look back and laugh now) I decided it might be a better to idea to tackle the shelves that needed attention. All I needed to do, was to take some old warped wooden shelving off its original angle brackets, and apply the new wood to the brackets. Simple??

Well, the brackets wouldn't come out of the slots in the rails. There was three years worth of dust and cat hair on the shelves. The screws which held the brackets and wood together had all been inserted with a seemingly diamond tipped screwdriver that had ripped the heads of the screws into perfect circles, thus rendering them impossible to remove. The brackets were bent and twisted.

It took effing ages, but I finally got it all done.

I've been putting screws in and out, and twisting allen key bolts, and bending metal and wood into unnatural shapes with my bare hands for the best part of a day, and the fingertips are transformed into pieces of tenderised veal.

My hands are the tools of my trade - blisters DO NOT make for good typing!!

Short blog!!