Ikea Desk

My friend asked me about whether I had an obsession with something. You know the kind where someone just knows an unreasonable amount of knowledge about some topic. I thought about it for a bit, hoping that I too was special and knew many things about some topic. And then came the realisation: I actually knew nothing.

But after some thinking (reluctant to accept the fact that I knew nothing) I realised that I actually do know things. I had just forgotten about them. In response to this mini-crisis I have created this website, so that I can have some place to look back on and say: this is what I know. Actually that is a lie, this website was planned for a while but this event has given me a new motivation to actually create it. And so this is my first post.

But why is the post called Ikea Desk? Because I bought an Ikea desk. This is now my forever desk; wherever I move I will hopefully dismantle this desk and reassemble it at any new location. It was one of those Ikea pieces where you had to manually create the screw holes by kind of just driving the screws in there. The kind that hurts your wrists. And when I was finally done creating my perfect forever desk, I noticed that the legs were crooked. It was no longer my perfect forever desk.

After desperately trying to level the table by attempting to re-insert the legs over and over again, I noticed something on the instruction page; a small detail that usually would go unnoticed: a screw cap on the base of each table leg. I always thought this was just a removable cap, perhaps a byproduct of the production process, but no. The thing you can screw in at the bottom of each table leg is there so you can lengthen the individual legs, thereby removing any gap you encounter. It seems as though Ikea is no stranger to human error.

I stood my crooked table up, and placed a dog food bag on it as a weight. I then tested each leg to see if it was floating above the ground, and then twisted the caps until they made contact with the ground. Now when I press down on my table, it is firm as it should be.

23/10/23 at Wolli Creek