No apologies for the obscure Frasier reference. I love that show.

I forgot to tell you that, the Argonut Café having an Actual Name that's tangentially related to, well, Argonauting, I find boat references sort of funny.

So, when wandering through a craft store a week ago, I spotted an incredibly inexpensive balsa-or-wood (the material is somewhere between those two) model of a sailing ship that you were allowed to assemble and finish yourself, I forked over the six bucks (yes, that's what it cost) and took my new toy home with me.

This weekend, I finally had a couple of hours to sit down, unwrap it, lay the pieces out, and--I know you're expecting my next words to be "assemble it" or even "start assembling it, but they aren't going to be--stare at it in bewilderment.

All of the pieces are there, no problem. There's a picture--unvarnished and unpainted for better reference--of the finished product. I just--can't tell which piece is which or what goes where.

Instructions: "Punch the pieces out from the balsa/wood board they're cut into. Attach to same number (1 to 1, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, etc.) using the picture and diagrams below as reference."

That's all very nice. Simple and clear, right? When I disassemble the pieces, there are handy slots for attaching, so that all seems good. But.

The pieces don't have numbers, not on them. The numbers are on the diagram and you're supposed to figure out (guess?) which piece they apply to. Many of the pieces are very similar in shape with only slight but (I suspect) rather important differences in length or width. It's impossible to tell from the diagram or picture if these two identical pieces are A1 and the two slightly larger pieces are B1, or vice-versa. the diagram isn't that precise.

Thirty minutes into the project, I thought to stop and Ponder Boatness. This led me to the revelation that the assorted pieces needed to be assembled on the framework of the keel (something mentioned nowhere in the instructions but which, in hindsight, I should have assumed from the beginning). You can't just hook "1" to "1" (assuming you figured out which two pieces each had a slot the designer thought of as "1") because you can't just push two pieces of wood together and shout stay! It's not a puppy.

So, I found the keel, found the pieces with slots "1" and "1" (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), placed each (facsimile) "1" on one side of the keel, let them go, and watched them drop to the floor. Not a puppy. Didn't stay.

There are no tabs--none of that Tab A and Slot B stuff. Yes, slots everywhere, but no tabs to push into them. The instructions mention gluing as an option if you want a permanent piece, but not just for assembly.

Another thirty minutes, and now I'm thinking that probably, when they told us to punch the pieces out from the board they were stamp-cut into? They didn't actually intend for us to separate mirror images from each other, even though those were stamp/cut in the same way other pieces were. Because, you see, if you didn't separate the mirror image pieces, then "1" and "1" are already hooked together! Voila!!

Granted, that would have been a better thought before I detached everything, but that was what the instructions said to do and, okay, the pieces wouldn't actually be attached to the keel, so you couldn't actually make a boat but I felt encouraged by this line of thought, even without having solved the problem of which pair of mirror-images had the designer's imaginary "1" on them and which had the "2", etc.)

It took only a few minutes to pick a handful of little strips of balsa-or-wood out of the trash with the idea that these discards might have been intended to do double-duty as pegs to keep "1" and "1" in contact while YES! if you pegged the mirror-image pieces together, then separated them a fraction of an inch, the middle part of the peg would just about fit into a heretofore unexplained slot in the keel and holding the two pieces against it!

That was the theory. It worked, too, except that the (probably makeshift) pegs are a trifle too wide for the slot and tend to break rather than slide in and except that the mirror-image pieces are a little too heavy to be held into place by 1/4" of balsa-or-wood sitting loosely in a 1/2" slot.

It looked right when I was holding the first piece, but when I let it go, it was not a puppy again.

Still. I'm not discouraged. I might have spent 90 minutes on the project and not actually have gotten two pieces attached, but I will try again. I don't think I have ever made a model before, of any kind. It is verrrry interesting.

I mean, you wonder what line of work is actually available to a sociopath in today's modern society, don't you? And then you try to assemble something and you look at the wholly inadequate and frequently outright dishonest instructions, and you know.