Five easy pieces? Not so fast, Jack
In a world of breast enhancements, tummy tucks, butt pads and Botox, it’s almost reassuring to realize that at least some things never change. I temper the reassurance with “almost” because, while the traditional may be satisfying, it can be simultaneously agonizing. I bring you today, dear friends, the insanity of installation.
I have been wary of putting things together since the day my son and I went camping on what was to have been a father-son outing. He was 7. The tent was new and impossible to assemble, so, after two hours of sweating and swearing, I threw it into the car trunk and took him to a motel. Thirty years later, he still hasn’t forgiven me. So much for family bonding.
The incident somehow failed to emerge from memory last week when we purchased a new Bar-B-Chef Offset Smoker/Grill combination. Even the name was daunting. “It comes in two boxes,” the clerk at Barbeques Galore said in response to my asking if any installation were required.
The reply would seem to indicate that you simply removed the contents of Box “A,” attached it with a bolt or two to the contents of Box “B,” filled it with charcoal, slapped a side of beef on the grill, chilled the Chardonnay and let the good times roll.
What the clerk had failed to mention was that each box contained, in addition to a basic fire unit and smoker, a variety of unattached legs, wheels, bolts, nuts, washers, grills and end caps that added up to 187 different items.
I spread the parts out on a table and the floor and stood there for a few terrible moments staring at them, the way I had once stared at a 30-caliber machine gun we were forced to field strip in Marine Corps boot camp. I could disassemble it just fine, but if my life depended on putting it back together, I was a dead man.
A similar thought flashed through my head as I observed the parts required to properly assemble the monster barbecue before me. “It just looks complicated,” the eternally optimistic Cinelli said, “but it’s probably not. The instructions say all you need is a screwdriver, a small hammer and a wrench. Note it says a small hammer. If it were difficult, they’d probably demand a large hammer.”
Normally, I could delay for days the necessity of undertaking a job I basically detested. Not this time. The dratted Bar-B-Chef was needed that very afternoon for a family gathering. As Cinelli put it, “Get to it, Chico.”
Picture this: It is 9 a.m. Company is due at 5. I lower my head. I sag. I sigh. No one is more expressive in dismay than I. Were there an Academy Award for discomfiture, I would be in contention.
“Where’s the hammer?” I ask in a voice of defeat.
“Where it’s always been,” Cinelli says.
“And the Phillips-head screwdriver?”
“Ditto.”
We play this game often.
“And where would that be?”
“In the tool drawer.”
“We have a crescent wrench?”
“You know we do!” Annoyed: “How many years do we have to have something before you know we have it?”
She finally gets the tools herself and hands them to me in a manner that suggests she’d prefer shoving them up my nose. I begin by reading the instructions: “Assemble wheel to axle leg as shown in Figure 3, using two axle bolts, washers & nylock nuts. Make sure the raised boss on the wheel faces the leg and also note the position of the wire rack hole to be opposite the side of the wheel.”
Huh?
I sigh again, but this time it is a sigh that says to jump in and do it, and if the machine gun blows up in your face, or your son runs away from home because you took him to a motel instead of the mountains, it’s God’s will.
I put the main part of the barbecue on its side and assemble its legs and am holding a wire rack that is supposed to be attached to the legs when I realize that something is wrong. “The fools put the leg holes in the wrong place,” I say. My granddaughter’s boyfriend, a film student, is watching. “You have to attach the rack before you assemble the legs,” he says, and leaves.
It is humiliating enough to make a mistake, but to have it detected by a teenage kid studying set designs and the history of cinematic sound is too much. My third sigh is one of a dying brain, and for seven hours I am in the realm of the living dead, going through the motions without heart or soul, animated only to the extent that my eyes see and my hands move.
I emerge with extra parts and no discernible place to attach them, so I dump them in a drawer for useless things. And forget the only-three-tools-required-for-assembly. Try two drills, two ratchet sets, two sizes of locking pliers and the very same 16-ounce hammer that broke my little finger 10 years ago when I was helping to build wooden forms for a concrete pour. I didn’t even know we still had it.
The Bar-B-Chef is assembled too late for the party, so Cinelli has to prepare dinner using other facilities, thus placing my failure in the same category as the tent and the machine gun. So the monster sits on the deck with its wheels facing the wrong way because I didn’t know what a raised boss was and couldn’t understand Figure 3.
Nothing is easy anymore. Sigh.
