My wife is very crafty. In fact, she spends several weekends in the fall and winter months going to craft fairs where she sells handmade wild rags, custom T-shirts, and other ranch-related merchandise. The booths that she sets up at these fairs have grown and evolved over the years. Every year she adds a few more products to her lineup, and every year she displays them just a little differently. She went from a couple of folding tables to having display racks and a cashiers stand. While her handmade products are top of the line, I cannot say the same for some of the stuff that gets ordered online to display all her creations.

                  When you order any kind of furniture or shelving online, most of the stuff is labeled as having some assembly required. They also falsely claim that no additional tools are required to assemble said furniture. Your wife reads this and looks at the dimensions and thinks to herself, “that looks easy to put together, I bet my husband could figure that out.” Our lovely brides then order their product from some far away overseas factory and pace about the house for two days until their product arrives on the front steps of the house. About day four after they ordered their prize possession, they called the delivery company 20 times, checked the tracking number on their phone and even called all the neighbors at least once asking them if they received a package by mistake. Finally, their anxious waiting pays off and the ranch dogs begin barking at the delivery truck coming up the driveway. After bribing the border collies with doggie treats, the delivery man can make his way up to the doorsteps of the house with a tattered package that looks like it was ran over by a forklift on a loading dock somewhere.

                  Like a kid on Christmas morning, my wife tears open the package revealing her purchase looks nothing like the picture online. She calls me over and looks at me with sad eyes and asks me if I would assemble her new display shelves for her. I am very happy to help and start piecing the shelves together one step at a time. Like all good husbands, I don’t even bother to read the directions. The tools that were included with the shelves look a lot like the little toy tools that you get a toddler as their first tool kit. After 30 minutes of putting together the first shelf only to discover that I put it together backwards, I concede that the directions might be relevant to this venture. So, after looking at vague pictures and trying to read directions written by someone who didn’t speak English as their first language, I break out my little tool kit and start again. Bolt after bolt, nut after nut, the shelf slowly comes together. Once I get the first shelf put together, I see how it was designed to be built and figure that the next one should be a breeze! Wrong again. The pre-drilled holes don’t line up and I lost three nuts when I tried to get them out of the childproof packaging. After three trips to the hardware store, some modification and a few choice words later, the shelves are built.

                  Ladies if you are out there reading this, remember not to be mad at him the next time that he buys a new tool without asking first. It might be a tool that he is forced to use on one of those some assembly required projects. And fellows, if you are left with additional parts after you put together one of these torture devices, just think of yourself as designing it more efficiently than the factory. That’s all for this time, keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and God bless.

Meinzer is a fourth-generation rancher raised on the southeastern plains of Colorado. He and his family live and ranch in Oshkosh, Neb.