From: hillman@carina.unm.edu (Dan Hillman)
Subject: Re: Self-Assembly (was Caffeine and mornings)
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 92 03:55:34 GMT
Organization: Angry Andy's House of Spiritual Peevishness
Keywords: grommets and washers o my

In article <42431@skye.dcs.ed.ac.uk> Not_Al_Crawford@ed.ac.uk (Not Al Crawford) writes:
>
[!Al peeves about assemble-it-yourself stuff]

>5. My CD racks. Now these are little plastic `cubes' that each hold 10 CDs.
>   For some reason, when I bought a CD player I decided these would be
>   *the* ideal system to keep my collection into. This decision was not a
>   good one.

Argh, those awful memories of plastic "organizers." If I had a dollar for
every "shit," "goddamn," "motherfucker," or "die!" that passed from my
lips as a result of one of these audio organizers, I'd be a much richer
man than I am now.

>   i)  The racks hold 10 CDs each. If the CDs are in those slimline jewel
>       cases or cardboard sleeves, they flop around. If they're in double
>       size jewel cases, you need to buy a special type of rack just for
>       them.

I went through a similar sort of agony with cassette tapes. Yes, I will admit
that when I went off to college I paid a good deal of money to get special
plastic holders for the cassettes. It seemed like a good idea at the time
because I had about 70 tapes and I wanted a tidy way to organize them.

I suppose the tip-off was when I started getting more and more tapes and
I couldn't find enough holders in the *right* color. Ya see, these things
came in either a relatively-inoffensive brown or a sickening orangy-yellow.
So then I had to decide where in the block to put the horrid yellow ones.
Along the top? Mixed up in pseudo-random patterns? Arg, decisions, decisions.

Around my third year of college I had over 400 tapes and I was *still* keeping
them in those damned organizers. Of course then it was getting pretty annoying
because each cassette went into its *own* slot. As a result, if I were to
get a tape by Elvis Costello, say, that would mean that I'd have to move
several hundred tapes one slot over to keep them in proper alphabetical order.

>   ii) They're designed to link together with the tongue-in-groove
>       connections providing added structural strength for the combined
>       units. They had *not* bargained on anybody linking 48 of the things
>       together in a mammoth block, like wot I have. The height I can pile
>       them is limited to 4 units high, since even that suffers from the
>       Pisa effect with the racks leaning at an alarming angle. I can't
>       fix them to the wall since it would require approximately 100 screws
>       to do so and would probably pull the plasterboard off the walls.

Yes, they do. Well over 400 tapes weigh more than enough to rip down most
shoddy plasterboard construction. I started with regular nails, then went
to plaster nails, picture hooks (the massive ones designed to hold 75-pound
pictures), and finally special masonary thingies that were designed to 
spread the force across a large area. It got to the point where I'd keep
plastering materials in my closet to repair the wall.

The most peevesome part (besides that gawdawful *CRASH* in the middle of the
night which signifies that several more cassette boxes have shattered and
the wall needs to be replastered) is having to take the damn thing apart
for moving. Like !Al's CD boxes, these cassette boxes "held together" with
tongue-'n-groove connections, which were fine to hold three of the things
together, but were close to useless at the scale I was using them. I found
that a hammer was quite good for separating the columns of boxes (usually)
and excellent for working off frustrations otherwise. 
-- 
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If goldfish could talk they'd still be boring. One would probably have a seat
next to me on an airplane and show me pictures of her grandchildren.
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