Eberson’s Law of Physics

Charles P. Eberson

A Senior’s Observations,
Opinions and Rantings

One recent morning, I woke up with my body wracked with pain. As I did a quick inventory of my back, shoulders, neck, and knees, I wondered what I did to warrant such discomfort. Upon getting out of bed, my wife asked if I was okay. I asked, “Did we do something last night that I can’t remember?” Her expression was unmistakably concerned.

As my mind cleared, I realized that I spent the last four days assembling a six-drawer dresser and a two-drawer, five-foot-long entertainment center for the TV from IKEA. I have put other IKEA pieces together over the years, including a huge entertainment center years ago when my son was in the single digits. It took days, but it was a father/son bonding experience, and I was certainly more nimble. Having done it before, I was confident I could do it again.

When we were checking out at IKEA, the clerk checked our purchases, and when she got to the dresser, she said, “You are missing two boxes.” Originally, when I picked up the one box with the corresponding number from the corresponding bin, I thought, “This shouldn’t be too bad, just one box.” However, now there were three boxes!

When I got it home and opened them up, I was greeted with three plastic bags of assorted screws, bolts, little wooden dowels, bits of plastic and all kinds of fasteners that I couldn’t believe I had to use in the assembly of the dresser. It looked like someone swept the floor of a factory at the end of a busy day, gathered it into a pile,  shoveled it into a plastic bag, and said, “Here you go!”

My wife described the enormous task I was confronted with to our son. He told her there is an app that one can utilize to have someone come to your house and assemble it for you. That was all I had to hear before emphatically refusing to take the easy way out. I opened the wordless thirty-eight-page pamphlet and went to work.

Every wooden piece must be oriented exactly the way it is in the drawing. Each nook, hole, ridge, cutout must be perfectly positioned. It reminded me of the comic in the newspaper where there are two almost identical images next to each other, and you must find what is different between the two. That is how closely you must examine every single move. I have grown to respect the manufacturing prowess and ingenuity of IKEA. To design the various types of furniture and everything that goes into the packaging, as well as the instructions, really is brilliant.

With that being said, what followed was a four-day crucible including a combination of yoga, Pilates, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with a little bit of Twister thrown in, followed by a Tylenol cocktail. As to the Eberson Law of Physics, I have determined that the frequency of dropped objects is directly proportional to the amount of pain one is in. The more difficult it was to bend over, the more often things slipped from my grip, and any efforts to pick them up looked like a slow-motion exercise. A yoga mat has now made its place on the floor, and the stretching in earnest has begun. I wonder how much IKEA pays to put these pieces together. It’s a workout!

Slowly, I emptied every plastic bag of screws, fasteners, and miscellaneous junk. Every piece of cardboard packing was thrown out. The pile of shelves, drawers and hardware became a dresser and TV entertainment center. All was good.