Don’t call me if you need something put together

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/07/2018 (2946 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Unlike most guys of my particular gender, I am completely inept when it comes to the manly art of putting things together.

In high school, for instance, I humiliated myself in shop class because, no matter what I attempted to build under the careful eye of our instructor, it ended up resembling a (bad word) ashtray.

My instructor: “Nice ashtray, Doug.”

Me (blushing): “Thank you, sir.”

My instructor: “You do know we were supposed to be building end tables, right?”

Anyway, there has been a real upside to my inability to assemble things from their component parts in the sense my beloved wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, simply does it herself without bothering to ask for my help.

My buddy Bob and his wife, Lena, recently gave us an awesome rolling firepit, and while my wife grabbed her collection of tools and marched into the backyard to piece it together, I bravely stood at the window and, from time to time, toasted her efforts by raising a cold glass of chardonnay in her general direction.

So, yes, I am pretty much a model modern husband, but that is not today’s point.

No, today’s point is that, myself excluded, guys can be far superior in the general area of do-it-yourself projects.

You don’t have to take my word for it, because this is the opinion of a group of scientists at the University of Tromsø in Norway, who recently conducted a groundbreaking experiment to determine who was better at putting stuff together, men or women.

What the Norwegian researchers did was devise a study to see whether men or women were better at one of the greatest challenges facing humanity — putting together IKEA furniture.

The researchers wanted to test the validity of a theory posed by Petra Hessler, formerly the head of IKEA’s German division. Hessler stated publicly that (gasp!) men have a harder time assembling the company’s flatpack furniture than women do.

“Men never look at the instruction leaflet and have the most problems when assembling our furniture because they think they can do it without help,” Hessler told Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

“A woman will neatly lay out all the screws, while a man will throw them in a pile. Something always goes missing.”

What I think she forgot to mention is the well-known scientific fact that men also refuse to look at maps when attempting to drive from one place to another, but, again, that is not today’s scientific point.

In the experiment, the scientists divided 40 college-aged men and 40 college-aged women into smaller groups — one with IKEA’s famously confusing assembly instructions, the other without — to see who was faster and more accurate when it came to building a råskog, which is a ready-to-assemble kitchen trolley.

According to what I read online and partially understood, in the group that was given a step-by-step assembly manual for the rolling kitchen cart, men got the job done 10 per cent faster than women (22.48 minutes compared with 24.80 minutes).

In the group that was provided only an image of the final product, however, men came in at 23.65 minutes compared with women’s 28.4 minutes, thus finishing faster, and providing bragging rights for guys of the extreme male gender.

Despite this major scientific breakthrough, the debate as to which gender is better at putting stuff together rages unabated, as we can see from the following story pulled from Uncle Doug’s real-life experiences.

In this case, my spouse purchased one of those “easy-to-put-up” backyard screen tents in an effort to protect us from the sun and mosquitoes the size of Land Rovers. My wife’s goal was to erect this tent because our niece, Amelia, and her new husband, Arthur, were coming to visit.

When our visitors arrived, my wife was still in the backyard struggling mightily with her easy-to-put-up tent, the result of which was, moments later, all four of us were inside the tent, cursing under our breath as we tried to use our various college degrees to figure out what the (bad word) was going wrong.

My role was to provide helpful comments to my wife, such as: “What kind of stupid (bad word) tent did you buy anyway?” And: “You would need a team of NASA scientists to put up this stupid (bad word) tent!”

Speaking of NASA scientists, I should point out that Arthur, my niece’s new husband, happens to be a brilliant mechanical engineer, yet he appeared as flustered as the rest of us over why the tent refused to be pieced together.

Then, as we fought to get the tent poles to extend properly and snap into place, my niece suddenly had a moment of inspiration, staring up at the ceiling and declaring: “I hate to say it, but I think we’re trying to put it up inside out!”

It turns out she was right. When we glanced up at the ceiling, we spotted the logo that was supposed to be on the outside of the roof. And when we looked at the photo in the instructions, it became clear that the tent poles we had bent the wrong way on the inside were, in fact, meant to be on the extreme outside of the structure.

In a matter of minutes, Arthur the engineer, aided by our clever niece, had reversed the whole thing and — PRESTO! — the tent was now right-side out, although I continued to scowl at my spouse to convey the notion that she should have consulted with me sooner.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not taking credit for fixing the inside-out tent. But I am saying that guys clearly are superior at putting stuff together, and I’m willing to prove it by helping you to assemble absolutely anything… provided it’s supposed to look like an ashtray.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca