Swiss kit says when you don’t hit nail on head
That inner whisper the same one, no doubt, that Charles H. Purcell heard as he built the Golden Gate Bridge urges you.
The desire to design, fashion and create with your bare hands swells up inside.
This must have been what Gustav Eiffel felt like as he surveyed the piles of steel girders that would become the Eiffel Tower.
And, as you survey your raw building materials and finger your leather tool belt, you take a moment to anticipate the challenge ahead.
Yes, when the sweat has dried and the dust clears, your wife will come home to... a brand new flat-pack wardrobe, constructed to perfection without the instructions, naturally.
The inner voice is chanting: "Find two biggish pieces, jam them together, quick, quick. It doesn't fit try the sledge hammer."
But what's this? Your computer screen is flashing an unwelcome message. "Stop! This is not the correct way. Please read the instructions," it says.
What's going on? Your whole DIY world falls down around you. Some damn nerd not a true-blooded constructor like you and Eiffel has gone and invented a foolproof, flat-pack furniture kit.
And it talks to you, telling you when you're going wrong.
"Smart technology" they call it. Smart ass, more like. How dare they encroach on our DIY rituals? Don't they know we need the raw adrenaline from the danger of DIY?
Where will it all end, lads? The damn wardrobe, with its smart-ass technology, simply refuses to be put together incorrectly.
The inventors, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, say people putting together flat-pack furniture ignore the assembly order in the instructions, thinking it doesn't matter.
But if we don't like instructions, how on earth do they think we'd go for someone telling us how to follow them?
