The IKEA shelf that ended my marriage (for one afternoon) like wtfuck
So my wife and I bought this "simple" IKEA shelf on Saturday. Thirty minutes, the box said. Thirty minutes, my ass.
Two hours in, I'm sitting on the floor surrounded by forty identical wooden dowels, and I look up and say, "Babe, I think we're missing a piece." She says, "You're missing a piece, you've had this thing upside down since the start." I did not have it upside down. I had it sideways, which is completely different.
We got to step 14 and the instructions just... stopped making sense. No words, just a little cartoon man holding a screw and looking as confused as I felt. I said "well fuck this specific step," and my wife, dead serious, goes "don't swear at the furniture, it's not the shelf's fault." I told her it absolutely was the shelf's fault, the shelf started this.
Eventually I found the missing piece. It was in my back pocket the whole time. I'd sat on it an hour earlier and just assumed it was my phone. When I pulled it out my wife laughed so hard she had to sit down, which, fine, fair.
Shelf's up now. It's crooked. We're pretending it's "intentional." Never doing flat-pack furniture again without a bottle of wine and a general acceptance that we are going to say some words we're not proud of.