In which is a mighty screw-up.

fter the demise of the Mutant Garage from Hell, there was a pressing need for a garden shed. Getting a garden shed involves a crucial decision: build from scratch (slow, frustrating and expensive) or buy a kit (also slow, frustrating and expensive.)

The choice is obvious. The kit includes the chance to cuss at the stupidity of the designer and builder. This is a refreshing break from cussing at your own stupidity, and well worth the money.

So, seats were removed from a van, in preparation for the pickup. This is a job for two large men, or one cornet player who played football without a helmet. Removal of the seats was accomplished without actual loss of digits, and deemed therefore to be a success. A journey was made to the nearest branch of the BORG (Big Orange Retail Giant) which had the relevant shed in stock.

The journey was not short. It had the quality common to Wagnerian operas and all other journeys in the Eastern province  of being much longer than you would imagine possible, and happening fairly late at night, while you wish you could just go home about halfway through.

(May I pause to mention how admirably the Eastern Province has risen above the traps of materialism? In some places, a man seeking a shed would be overwhelmed with the importunate offers of a crowd of shed-merchants pestering him with multiple redundant sheds. Not here. Here, the purchase of anything from a slow-cooker to an ordinary Northumbrian Spoke-shaver's Coracle involves something like a pilgrimage, and many hours of slow contemplation behind the wheel. Sometimes a sort of lectio divina of the provincial road maps as well... but I digress.)

Having acquired the shed, I assembled it with much help from Number 1 Son. There's a interesting "blame the victim" approach to the instructions that come with shed kits. The instructions are written with an assumption that shed parts are made by the factory, and mistakes are made by the customer. This assumption is poorly supported by reality. (Naughty, naughty reality!)

The assembly is actually fairly straightforward, rather on a level with teaching a rhinoceros to play scrabble: First, a foundation was assembled, and shimmed until we were too bored to shim it any more.

Dude, did we use enough shims?

Then, bits were screwed together, in an order as rigid as the court protocol of the Kingdom of Absurdly Rigid Protocol.

World's tallest midget for scale.

Then more bits are screwed together.

Something something house begins to close upon the growing something...

Until it looks like this:

Not Shown: Assembly of Floor Kit. Because madness.

The kit contains about 400 parts, of which approximately 370 are screws of different sizes. The customer also needs a number of things not supplied with the kit, or mentioned in the quadralingual (English, French, Spanish, and possibly Klingon) instructions: Unearthly patience. Meticulous organization. Fair weather (strangely, unavailable from the manufacturer, even as an optional extra). A complete lack of wind, (unavailable even as a third party aftermarket add-on.) And most of all, multiple drill bits of a size to re-drill the 47 mis-aligned pilot holes in the parts provided.

It does not matter how meticulously you level and square everything, some of those holes are determined to stick it to the man, and will never fall in line. Don't sweat it, don't stress, and never try to negotiate with them. Just drill more holes.

Eventually, the shed was up.

As Plumbun Major put it: "Dadats 'ome."

Tune in next time for the greatest hits of the 15th century, I kid you not.