I must be a sucker for Ikea

For some years now, I have been working off a big desk at home that is totally bereft of drawers or filing. It's great - I just dump everything on top and when the mess gets too much, I throw out all the rubbish, stack up the things I want to keep and move on.

Due to space restrictions though, I now have to share the desk. Boo hoo. I am now down to about 1/3 of the area that I am used to, since a fax and another PC now occupy the other 2/3 of the desk. That meant I finally had to relent and buy a 3 drawer thingy to stash all my loose junk in. Ikea seemed to offer the best bargain with the 3 drawer thingys costing only $49.

I think. I'm sure I only paid $49. Maybe it was $59? Who knows. It was less than you'd probably pay for a half decent unit second hand.

The only problem with buying a GOLIAT from Ikea is putting the blasted thing together. They always fool you in the shops by presenting fully built models. That to me is false advertising - they should instead display what the thing looks like when you pull the 74 bits out of the box and have them spread around you on the floor. Then throw in a couple of toddlers to smash the foam packing into 63,000 little white bits and to jump up and down on the cardboard box until it is mush.

It shouldn't have been that hard. After all, the little Dalek of a thing barely reaches my knee, has no moving parts and consists largely of a base, two sides, a back and a top.

Well, it wasn't that hard really, except that my legs ached from bending over for an hour or so whilst screwing it together.

What I did work out is that this self-assembley idea is a crock. I have just bought something for $49 that has numerous metal and plastic fasteners, umpteen bits of wood, plastic runners and door handles and was all cut and packed in China and shipped to Australia and it still only cost $49.

Which means if you take out the profit and the shipping costs and the handling and transport and storage and the general overhead of running a 2 acre shop, means it probably cost about $10 to make in China. Which also means some rice eating bloke was probably paid about 20 cents an hour to cut it and pack it.

If it took me an hour to put it together, why not give the guy another bowl of rice and get him to put it together? After all, it would increase the price from $49.00 to $49.20.