If you’ve been conscious and aware of what’s been going on around you, especially during the past few decades, you’ll have heard, on more than one occasion that our lives are drastically changed, that life today is much different than the lives of our parents, or our parent’s parents. Phones no longer need to remain at home, TVs have more than 5 or 6 channels, one no longer has to leave the house to buy porn groceries, as one can buy most things on the internet and have them delivered. Yet, in the midst of all this change, it’s refreshing to find that some things haven’t changed much.
I am currently reading the book “The Best American Essays of the Century“, edited by Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of the essays written in the twentieth century. I’ve just finished reading “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away” by S. J. Perleman, first published in 1944, and, though it’s 68 years old, it feels remarkably familiar and contemporary. Here’s the opening paragraph:
One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique (eventually adopted by the psychology department of Duke University, which will adopt anything), the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340° F. and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble. The Jiffy-Cloz, procurable at any department store or neighborhood insane asylum, consists of half a dozen gigantic sheets of red cardboard, two plywood doors, a clothes rack, and a packet of staples. With these is included a set of instructions mimeographed in pale-violet ink, fruity with phrases like “Pass Section F through Slot AA, taking care not to fold tabs behind washers (see Fig. 9).” The cardboard is so processed that as the subject struggles convulsively to force the staple through, it suddenly buckles, plunging the staple deep into his thumb. He thereupon springs up with a dolorous cry and smites his knob (Section K) on the rafters (RR). As a final demonic touch, the Jiffy-Cloz people cunningly omit four of the staples necessary to finish the job, so that after indescribable purgatory, the best the subject can possibly achieve is a sleazy, capricious structure which would reduce any self-respecting moth to helpless laughter. The cumulative frustration, the tropical heat, and the soft, ghostly chuckling of the moths are calculated to unseat the strongest mentality.
I, thankfully, have no permanent scars from anything I’ve had to assemble over the years. Though, I do cringe whenever I think of shelves that I ended up throwing away because, after more than two hours of trying to figure the poorly-written instructions out, I became so maniacally frustrated that I was unable to completely screw-in a screw (is there a better way to say that?) that I got out the hammer, to try and drive it the rest of the way in, and, in my mentally unstable state, I smashed the screw so hard that I split the panel, resulting in a large chuck of fake wood to fall to the ground. The shelves went into the garbage *only* because I lived in the city, and couldn’t burn the damn thing!
So, in a rather odd way, I find a sense of All’s-Well-With-The-World, knowing that, even in 1944, products that needed assembly won’t show up in stories about The Good Old Days.
Have you ever had a meltdown while trying to assemble a product?
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As someone who’s never been big on daytime television talk shows, I read this part of Lucy Grealy’s essay, As Seen On TV: Provocations, and wished I’d been the one to have said it:
