It all worked out, provided you were attentive to every tiny detail and had the patience of a saint.
These days, though, nearly everything you buy has "some assembly required." When you order a chair, a bed or a barbecue, you get a bag of tiny parts and an instruction leaflet that needs a magnifying glass to decode. If I bought a new car, I'm sure I would be given 1,043 pieces, a wrench and an oxyacetylene welding set.
Recently my wife, Jocasta, ordered two outdoor lounge chairs so we could enjoy some time together in the sun.
When they arrived, she suggested that I assemble them. The instruction pamphlet had a picture of a tiny, straightshouldered man and a clock indicating that the job would take 45 minutes.
They could have entered the pamphlet in the Booker Prize for Fiction. A more accurate ideogram would have been a clock spinning to infinity and a bent-double fellow whose spirit was broken. I started work on the chairs at noon and finished, ironically, just as the sun was going down.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 2024-Ausgabe von Reader's Digest India.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 2024-Ausgabe von Reader's Digest India.
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ME & MY SHELF
Siddharth Kapila is a lawyer turned writer whose writing has focussed on issues surrounding Hinduism. His debut book, Tripping Down the Ganga: A Son's Exploration of Faith (Speaking Tiger) traces his seven-year-long journey along India's holiest river and his explorations into the nature of faith among believers and skeptics alike.
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