Let’s assume for twelve whole seconds that you wanted to buy a dining room table. I mean – occasionally, people just want one, say, if they don’t have one. It fills the room. It holds up a center piece. It doesn’t really even matter if you eat at it – it just fills a void.

I wanted a dining room table. I don’t have a large house (1,300 square feet, give or take) so I don’t have a real, honest-to-goodness dining room, but I have a dining area between my kitchen and my living room. And it’s been empty. Do you know how depressing a big, empty space is? I even put a rug over there, thinking it’d help. Then, all I had was a rug in a big empty space.

Because the space is small, I need a small-scale table which limits my choices because “pretty” isn’t generally a term that be used to describe the small-scale tables I’ve found. If I have been able to find one that’s smallish and pretty, it’s astronomically expensive.

Finally, I found a table that met all of my criteria. I paid for it in U.S. dollars and brought it home. I sorted all of the nuts and bolts and screws and funky little uneven spacer washer thingies into neat piles and broke out the instructions. I didn’t have a freaking clue what they meant. The diagrams were complicated and fuzzy. Saying that the directions weren’t clear would be the understatement of the century. Nevertheless, I figured it out. I put the seats on the chair backs. I put the legs on the seats. And then, I tried to put the legs on the table top only to find out that the table top was broken. And now just a little broken – SERIOUSLY broken. Super cracked. Ultra bad.

I loaded the table top into the car and took it back to the store where one friendly and one not so friendly person helped me to discover that my store no longer had this table. Of course. Politely, they called another store almost 30 miles from mine who had one in stock. I drove to said store, switched the table tops, came home, finished assembly and now present to you my new, inexpensive, small-scale dining room table.

(You happy, B? No assembly required. I figured it was the least I could do for dragging your ass out of the house, even when you didn’t want to go.)