Now I am fond of owning tools as much as the next person and over my time have collected a substantial variety of small allen keys.
Frank Tuttle: Some Assembly Required
I would suggest that the majority of individuals like to think of themselves as exhibiting some degree of "handiness" - that ephemerally useful skill required to complete tasks that would otherwise be completed by a properly trained professional. With our civilisation moving beyond the basic hunter-gatherer skill-set it would seem that we are faced with the requirement to be competent at an increasing number of tasks in what would appear to be a self-perpetuating phenomenon. While my generation has become adept at eating fast food, it is the younger generation that has secured the various key employment positions responsible for assembling such food.
Up until recently I used to wonder how a restaurant based around the concept of customers cooking their own food could ever stay in business. I often considered this analogist to going to a Doctors office and being given a white coat and prescription pad and told to sort myself out. After all, I both cook at home and take aspirin when I have a head-ache, so I didn't consider it that much of a stretch. I now, however, have a clearer understanding of the social evolution in action that would enable such things to happen - and I believe it started with shelves.
Now I am fond of owning tools as much as the next person and over my time have collected a substantial variety of small allen keys, however knowing that I will be unlikely to find another use for these is not sufficient enough reason to dispose of them. These tools are all that is required to build shelves in this modern day. In fact it is almost possible to build any piece of furniture with them so it is best at this point to hang onto them, just in case there is a chaise-lounge in my future that needs assembling.
Just as the evolutionist vs. creationist battle rages, so I believe does the "assembliest" vs. "handiest" in terms of which came first. Obviously from the earliest of days there was a requirement to construct shelter (with and without shelves) but it must be asked whether this was the birth of the handiest movement in the sense that they took the available components and constructed the required shelter, or the advent of the assembliest age in the sense that crude allen keys were fashioned from bones and rock.
So the question remains on whether we are required to adopt new skills as and when a task becomes required due to it now only being partially completed, or is this simply the natural progression of hyper-professionalism and specialisation such that the skill is now in providing components rather than completed items? I like to think we have reached an age where assembly and handiness can live in harmony. A time when child-proof lids can be opened by adults and jigsaw puzzles are embraced as a pleasure activity rather than disguised as some strange type of mental torture in the form of an instruction manual for installing a new printer. Now if I could just find that box for my OEM software.
Submitted by Frank on December 01, 2005.
