Some Anaesthesia Required

It’s that time of year again. Time for parents to steal away and put together the “Santa” gifts in secret so the tiny terrorists can keep the magic alive one more year. I’m convinced that toy manufacturers have a special set of instructions they include in the packages they expect to sell over Christmas. You know what I’m talking about. These are the instructions that take pains to include actual-sized illustrations of the ¾” screws, but whose diagrams for assembly require a 4,000 power microscope to read. Even then, those fun-loving engineers tend to include drawings more resembling optical illusions than any sort of true three-point perspective, as the lines showing you where to attach various accessories always look like they are zooming off into the Cartesian horizon instead of into some physical part of the toy.

And would it be too much to ask for someone to actually lay out these booklets in some sort of desktop publishing program before they’re printed? That way, you’d know beforehand if some crucial piece of information fell on the other side of the fold. I love turning the page over and seeing:

STEP 9b – Continued: Though the illustration seems to indicate otherwise, under no circumstances are the snapbaffles to be inserted onto the auxiliary flange before the flousting lever is rotated to parallel. The snapbaffles cannot be removed once they are assembled, and if you’re reading this after completing all of the other steps on the previous page, you’re just going to have to go buy a new one and start over – or explain to your child why there’s no gift from Santa for them. Ha ha HA HA HA!

They’re also misleading about the “Tools Required” section. It’s always just: Hammer. Phillips screwdriver. Yes, technically, you could assemble the entire toy with just those two items. As long as your screwdriver has a magnetic head, can adjust from 3” to 10” long, turn in right-angles, and has a built-in LED light source and jeweler’s loupe. There’s a reason Santa uses elves to do all of the toymaking – small hands. They can get into the 1 1/16” gap between the primary camshaft and the torqueguard to tighten down the friction pins. The same friction pins that the instructions reference in big bold red letters, letting you know that if they aren’t at the correct depth, the entire toy becomes one big deathtrap.

Adding to the fun is trying to do all of this in an unheated garage, where every scrape of the knuckles or pinched finger is exponentially more painful – and the fact that the garage shares a wall with the kids’ room means I can’t even cuss satisfactorily.

This is why my stocking is always full of bandages, rum and Valium.

Merry Christmas, y’all.