Since I'm living the good life now, I can afford to purchase some of my furniture at Ikea rather than fashioning my furnishings from dead weeds and the broken shards of my social life like during my grad school days. Earlier today, I purchased one of the modest television stand options in the Ikea lineup and began the assembly process.
Ikea does not wish to rule all of metropolis so much as all of the world. And, they wish to do so in frugal fashion. To this end, there are no assembly packets containing written words, thereby obviating the need to customize instructions for different linguistic markets. Rather, they provide assembly manuals with diagrams and some creepy cartoon man warning against errors commonly committed during the assembly of furniture pieces whose names contain a shit-ton of umlauts. I found one of these warnings puzzling. For your viewing pleasure...
At first, I thought they might be warning me against fornicating with my new piece of furniture. Or, judging by the look on fella's face, maybe they meant that if you try to screw your furniture, and you're unable to perform, you'll surely break your tv stand. But, neither of these things seemed terribly likely. (That is, it didn't seem likely that Ikea would warn me against making sweet, sweet love to my television stand. Though for the record, I do think it's likely that having sex with your furniture is a bad idea and on far too many levels to explore in this space.) For a spell, I then thought that they were encouraging me to gently caress my furniture with my hooved hand during assembly.
Finally, after a couple more minutes of staring (seriously, it took this long, and I was completely transfixed by this mental exercise), I realized the intent of the cartoon. Since it's probably too obvious to state (and since I'm secretly hoping that one of you will also struggle with the meaning), I leave the interpretation of the diagram as an exercise for the reader.
