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After a bit of lie-in my wife suggested we put together the pram that arrived last week, but was still in its cardboard box. I thought that that would be pretty easy, especially given the way I had expertly put together a six piece crib with only one major error and didn’t anticipate it taking more than half an hour. Ah hubris, thy name is Herring.
Getting the wheels on was pretty easy, but from there on in things got unreasonably complex. Not because there was anything very tricky to do, but again because the instructions were solely in the form of pictures with hard to identify close-ups, arrows pointing at unspecified things and it seemed to me, many important steps and pieces of information missed out. I can understand that diagrams are very useful in helping people to construct things, but there seems no reason why that should not be accompanied by some words as well. I am very bad at this sort of thing and my brain does not work very well with three dimensional puzzles or visualisation, but attaching a pannier to the bottom of a pram is hardly rocket surgery, let alone brain science and the necessary manoeuvre to twirl a studded tab through a little loop needed more than a tiny drawing and an arrow to explain it. Perhaps the people putting these things together assume some kind of basic competency and common sense, but I don’t have those things. I want it explained to me very slowly. I did not cope well with the humiliation of not being able to fulfil this basic requirement of fatherhood. My wife remained calm, but I threw the instructions across the room and behaved, ironically enough like a baby chucking his toys out of a pram. How I would have loved to have a fucking pram to chuck my toys out of. I wondered if the pram manufacturers do this on purpose in the hope of splitting up expectant parents with the long term aim of selling them another pram when they have separated. Or driving them into the arms of someone else who they will then have another baby with and have to buy more prams. Or maybe just hoping they will be so cross that they will smash the pram into pieces and have to buy another pram.
Luckily my marriage is strong and one of us is not a ridiculous childish idiot (I am not saying which one though) and although I was all ready to throw the whole pram down a well, because I couldn’t attach the little pannier thing, my wife worked out what was required and we could move on to the next equally frustrating illustration and try to work out how to get the cot part together. And don’t start me on how long it took me to attach the canopy.
I had looked on youtube to see if I could find an actual human being instructing me and showing me how to put the pram together, but the only one I found came in two parts. Part one had the man removing all the pieces of the pram from the box, which I had managed to do without instruction and part two jumped straight to the completed pram and how to move it around and store it. Did this guy really think that unpacking the pram was more complex than constructing it? Am I really so stupid that I don’t know how to do that bit?
Though I do stay level-headed through most crises this tortuous process put me in a terrible mood all day. We finally got the pram together and it looked like it was supposed to look (though I did not want to even have to think about how we were meant to compress it to get it on to buses or into the boot of the car). I then unpacked the car seat in order to check that it was easy enough to attach to the pram and to its fancy electronic unit that you put into the car. That was pretty much fine but once I’d put the chair on the unit I found that I had no idea how to get it off. The instructions for the chair were once again, just pictures, with arrows. I found one that I think was trying to tell me how to remove the chair and pulled at the handle I thought the arrow was pointing at. And pushed and pulled everything else that looked like it might be a release switch. I wanted to cry. And would have happily chucked all this down a well as well. I thought that I would just buy a new car seat every time I wanted to move the baby around. And also I’d probably need a new car too. And perhaps, as some people suggested on Twitter (including the Olympic gold medallist Chris Hoy, which is not something I ever thought would happen) I could just create new babies every time one got stuck in the car.
I’d been failing to build baby stuff for over three hours now and decided to leave it, but someone on Twitter managed to let me know in 140 characters what I had to do to release the seat. It was much clearer than a bad drawing and a vague arrow. The lever didn’t even looks like a lever, but there it was, pretty much the only bit of the thing that I hadn’t tried to bend or push. I still can’t get the base steadying leg down from underneath the contraption, but I’d been doing this long enough and nothing was broken and everything was nearly in its right place. So I left it.
Having a baby can’t be as hard work as making the pram. Can it?
