Home Decor Disorder

Now I realize that the good folks at Umbra contemporary furnishings corporation probably employ cheap overseas labor, and when you're a Malaysian pre-teen factory worker who has been recently caned by the union supervisor it's easy to become distracted and forget to put screw set A into the packaging for the "Padoga Espresso" curtain rod with the nice modern design that says "sure, we're not loaded but we spent a couple of bucks" to any potential home admirers.

And certainly the lack of screw set A in BOTH of the curtain rods I purchased yesterday from the home furnishing supercenter is a small matter. But to be honest, the challenges of quality control for a company forced to compete globally in the cut-throat home decor market seem opaque to me when I am balancing on a chair late at night, drill in one hand, unmountable bracket in the other, wife at a table nearby frantically picking through an incomplete set of mounting hardware and muttering "it's just ... not here" like a bomb-dazzled refugee wandering back through her obliterated village.

As an American I have been bred on convenience, so the absence of screw set A has unleashed a cascade of raw emotion at a time when home maintenance and improvement have driven the wife and I to exhaustion. One day these concerns will abate, and I will once again write to you dear reader about the issues of the day, and the children will no longer be fed gummi bears and bacon for breakfast because Daddy is in a rush after being up late last night staring in a really creepy way at the curtain rod, the drill, and the mounting hardware and trying to return to his peaceful, happy place.