I've been building a new office in my downstairs space for quite a while now. It's a "weekends" project for someone who doesn't have very many weekends. In early December, I broke down and hired a contractor to install the laminate ("cardboard") flooring, which was the penultimate step in the master plan.

Last comes furniture, then moving in. (Which starts the chain of dominoes, as my eldest gets the bedroom which used to be my office, then my youngest takes her spot, which makes room for the new baby. The challenge is to finish with the hole migration before the new electron gets injected. No, that wasn't a spelling error.)

So this weekend, I had thirty-six boxes of IKEA modular furniture from "Work IKEA" to assemble.

You have time to meditate on many lessons when you are assembling thirty-six boxes of IKEA modular furniture.

For example, I've never seen a company that makes it so difficult to purchase from them. I don't really want to know that the six-shelf bookshelf I picked out from the design software actually comes as three separate SKUs. Just sell me the damn shelf.

I shouldn't have to learn what a "CDO" is in order to pick out a bunch of stuff and have them deliver it on a specific day. I shouldn't have to make three trips into the store because they cannot take my credit card number over the phone.

And can someone please explain why I have to remove items from my delivery order because the local store doesn't have them in stock? In some fields of endeavor, timing is everything, but why should I have to call them every day to find out when the left-handed tabletop comes in, then rush to the store and place my order so the piece can be pulled from inventory?

It makes no sense to me. The whole process was implemented for the convenience of IKEA, not IKEA's customers. They've made a business decision to optimize for cost control rather than customer satisfaction. IKEA is certainly free to make that choice, and they do seem to be making profits, but I'm not likely to choose them for future furniture purchases.

Exposing that much of your internal process to the customer--or end user--is never a good way to win the hearts and minds of your customers.

Most of the assembly went without incident, though I was often perplexed by trying to map the low-level components into the high-level items I designed with. IKEA offers zero-cost software for download to design a floorplan with their lines, but it works at a higher level of abstraction. I was often left wondering which item a particular component was supposed to construct.

The components were very well designed. Each piece can either fit together in only one way, or it is rotationally symmetric so either orientation works. In either case, I, the assembler, am not left with an ambiguous situation, where something might fit but does not work.

The toughest pieces were the desks. Desks can be configured in about eighty-nine different ways. The components are all modular and generally have the same interfaces. I have a lot of flexibility at my disposal, but at the expense of complexity. A significant number of sample configurations helped me understand the complexity of options and pick a reasonable structure, but I can't help but wonder how the experience could be simplified.

The furniture is all assembled now, and the office sits expectantly waiting for its occupant, full of unrealized potential.