The true story of his new furniture, during which Wil got angry, happy, injured and finally angry/happy.

So yesterday I was supposed to have some furniture delivered by a company called Estes Express. I had originally thought that I was not happy about Estes’s insistence that they could only deliver it yesterday between 10 and noon. They told me at least four times that Tuesday between 10 and noon was the only time that they could deliver it this week, so I bit the bullet and skipped my 11am class to be here for the delivery. I called them at 12:03pm, and asked where they were, at which time I was told that my appointment was today. Four times they told me it was yesterday.

So I go to class this morning and walk up to my building at 9:06am, at which time I see the Estes truck circling the block. When I checked my phone, I discovered that he’d been calling since 8:23am (97 minutes before I had planned to be ready for him.) Considering the inflexibility of their delivery time, I wasn’t able to get the building loading dock reserved for either the original time they told me or the new one.

So the truck driver parks out front, gets an oversize pallet off of his truck, and we bring it through the front doors. It won’t fit on the elevator, but that’s not an issue. It’s not an issue because the truck driver told me that the delivery was to the building, and to take my furniture up to the 8th floor would cost me five-thousand dollars. The building management tried to be nice about the whole thing (and succeeded,) but they weren’t about to let me de-pallet the stuff in the lobby and put it on the elevator.

So we took MonsterPallet back out the front door and around to the parking garage, where we parked my furniture semi-near the elevator. After an hour or so, I’d transferred the furniture upstairs and cleaned up the parking garage. By this time, I was pretty pissed.

So, I started angrily assembling my furniture. I started that way, but excitement about the new stuff quickly loosened me up and I was grinning by the time my desk was up. I then put together the media stand and the media tower.

I was almost done with the media tower when disaster struck. Legare furniture is kind of like Legos. You assemble it all without tools or hardware, and everything just kind of slides together. Unfortunately, until the last piece is in place, everything can just kind of slide apart. I was lifting the almost fully assembled media tower upright as per the manufacturers assembly instructions when it did indeed slide apart. Most of it came down, hard, on my right foot.

X-rays show a possible break in my right big toe. The doctor was talking about the potential need to put pins in the bones to avoid permanent impairment, as the big toe plays a big part in one’s balance. Fortunately, I was wearing my walking boots (on purpose, to protect my feet while assembling furniture) at the time, otherwise, it could have been a lot worse. After the thing came down on my foot, I put it back together and stood it up, being careful this time not to let it fall apart.

Then, just to prove that Dave Barry is right, I unboxed and assembled the bookcase before I walked to the PSU student health center to have them check my foot. In a way, I’m glad I did, because I’m certainly in no mood to wrestle with furniture assembly now.

So I’m angry again, but I’m also kind of happy to be typing this at a desk instead of a couple of plastic crates stacked on top of each other.

The final scores are:

• Legare/Estes vs. Wil: 1 to 0
• Media tower vs. Wil’s foot: 1 to 0
• Wil vs. Lack of furniture: 4 to 0