If I could trade places with someone born wealthy, just for a day, there are 3 things I'd make them do to truly experience what it's like to be a blue collar dickhead with a mortgage and car payments and a closet full of faded Van Heuesen button-downs.
1. Work in an office.
As we all know, this fucking sucks. Unless you are the CFO of a Fortune 500 company and you have a 2,500 sq ft office that overlooks heaven, complete with a hot tub and a Brooklyn Decker doppelganger as your assistant, or you have a time machine that takes you back to the "Mad Men" era of advertising and you can smoke cigarettes and drink scotch and slap any passing-ass during a client pitch, working in an office is as fun as covering your face with turpentine and then lighting it on fire.
2. Commute
Not many things are worse than commuting. Now, these rich assholes may spend lengthy amounts of time in a car while idling, but most likely they're in the back blowing coke and having unprotected sex with Brazilian models and berating the driver for the city's uncontrollable congestion. That's not too hard to endure. I'd also include a couple of subway rides too, because, as we all know, they are Satan's playground. Every time that I read a story about some rich asshole saying they love how charming New York City is, I want to invite them down to the Union Square 4/5/6 platform during August rush hour and see how fucking charmed they are when someone begins playing the electronic saxophone into their eardrum and the guy in front of them begins emitting an odor that smells like a rotting waterlogged corpse. Let's see how fucking charmed they are then...
3. Build a Piece of Cheap Furniture
Yes, you guessed it, this will be the topic for today. Putting together furniture is more fucking difficult and painstaking than trying to work a faulty vending machine while drunk.
To expand on this topic...
Since I moved out of my parent's house and went to college, I've probably put together 5,000 different pieces of furniture from 100 different vendors. None of them physically exist anymore, because they were all pieces of shit. When you see the desired piece on display or in the box, you immediately think, "Wow, this looks great, it's perfect for displaying all the difficult books I pretend to read!" But then you go home and begin to assemble it and the shit is all types of fucked up, and you want to explode. The holes for the pegs aren't big enough (that's what she said), the midget screws are stripped, and sometimes the cheap wood is peeling. You feel violated. WHAT THE FUCK, I SPENT $79.99 ON THIS BED AND IT SUCKS???
Nothing will make you feel more inept than failing to assemble something stupid, like a nightstand. It's a fucking nightstand. What is difficult about four sides, four legs, and a top? Well, when the directions are written by a Swedish Savant and the drawings are more complicated than "The Ramsey Theory," it's no wonder the piece-of-shit comes out looking like it belongs in an alley next to a strung-out hobo.
God forbid you try and buy furniture from a place that sells things already assembled. Nothing EVER costs what the ticket price says. Stores list them cheaper so you will come in, ask about it, feel stupid when they price you out, and then make fun of you as you go back to your studio apartment, shut the shades, and cry about how much of a failure you are.
You: I'd like to buy this desk.
Clerk: Oh, what a fine choice. This antique Californian Redwood table is varnished with the marrow of a Siberian Tiger Teddy Roosevelt killed with a crossbow, and is held together by screws made out of human femur chips. It's one of our most popular pieces we have. Shipping and delivery will cost you $5,500 because the table can only be flown from California to New York in an HU-16 Albatross. We have a special payment plan that will only cost you $899 a month plus taxes for the rest of eternity. Now, can I have your address?
You: (blows brains out)
And there is really nothing you can do about the furniture business. You can't build your own. That's just fucking stupid. About 30 people in this country can build their own furniture, and they're smart enough to know that some rich old bitch will pay 1,000% over the production cost because it's considered "one-of-a-kind" and "modern-vintage." Well, fuck you, modern vintage. Look over here at this table I MADE. I made it out of a fucking tree stump from a tree I cut down in Madison Square Park. And I carved a picture of Steve McQueen fucking Ali McGraw into the wood. Price? $100,000 - it's NEW-AGE-VINTAGE-OBSCURA!
The best part is, I'm building a bookcase right now as I write this, because I am a rube. And staying true to my bitch-fest above, it fucking BLOWS. I've had to reassemble shit like five times already. Oh look, the leg is in the wrong spot, what a happy fucking surprise. On top of the instructions sucking, I've had to stop myself from grabbing the hammer and absolutely destroying the fucking bookshelf's life. Oh man, it would just be so satisfying to hear the splintering of wood. I wouldn't even mind cleaning up the mess - just to see it ruined would make me happy for a month. "Remember that bookcase I had? Well, I fucking smashed it to pieces with a rubber mallet. It was amazing. What do you mean I'm an idiot. YOU'RE A FUCKING IDIOT!"
