An Open Letter to Furniture Manufacturers

Dear Furniture Manufacturers,

Hello, my name is Susie. It’s a pleasure to meet you! I would shake your hand, except that my fingers are covered in calluses and blisters. In fact – at a cursory glance, you are probably wondering why I look so beaten up right now. Coincidentally enough, that just so happens to be why I’m writing you! So WORRY NOT, Furniture Manufacturers, your curiosity is about to be sated.

Do you see these, here on my fingers? These are blisters, from using the tiny piece of scrap metal you provided to try and tighten the too-small bolts on the bottom of our new dining room table. These red patches on my knees? That’s severe rug burn, from crawling around on all fours for eight straight hours to try and make sense of your 90-page assembly instruction booklet to build my new desk. And all up and down my arms, here? These are cuts and scrapes, which came from a veritable plethora of sharp edges, exposed metal, and unsanded wood.

I am a bloody, scabby mess, and thanks to you I’ll probably be the topic of domestic violence rumors at work tomorrow. These battle wounds are a result of what will hereafter be known as “the furniture fiasco of 2014.”

But truly, I could have forgiven all that, Furniture Manufacturers, had it not been for this massive bruise on my leg.

This bruise – this damned giant purple thing – is a result of trying to shove a colossal, 11-foot couch through our bedroom door.

A quick word about this couch: It is gorgeous. It has glossy brown leather with double-stitching, and big overstuffed cushions that make you want nothing more than to bellyflop onto them. It has an aura of prestige, and looks like it belongs in a Ron Burgundy-type apartment that has many leather-bound books and smells of rich mahogany. I have nothing negative to say about the design here, Furniture Manufacturers. You really outdid yourself on this one.

HOWEVER. My praise has to stop there, because in manufacturing this couch you either must be severely dim-witted, or just plain mean.

Taylor and I, like big doofs, absolutely fell in love with the couch when we saw it. We each performed the aforementioned bellyflop in the store. Our blissful ignorance was overshadowed only by our blind enthusiasm to immediately shell out hundreds of dollars on this wonderful, perfect, too-good-to-be-true sofa.

We frolicked home like giddy idiots, skipping to and fro without a care in the world. “What could go wrong?” we tempted the universe, “the couch is perfect, life is perfect, everything is perfect.”

Eager to see our purchase in its new environment, we hauled it upstairs stripped away all its protective padding and plastic. After taking a moment to admire it (again), we each grinned and grabbed a side, ready to slide it right in through the office door and settle it into its new home.

It only took about 30 seconds of pushing, twisting, and re-assessing before our cheerful grins melted into wide-eyed horror. As we hoisted the couch with our trembling white-knuckled hands into the doorway for a third time, the optimistic fog began to settle, and it started to become clear:

It will not fit through the door.

The thought occurred to me as if spoken by a razor-tongued demon – and its absolute, soul-crushing truth cut through me like a punch to the gut. Suddenly the weight of this realization, paired with the already agonizing weight of the couch, was just too much to bear. We dropped it to the floor with a pathetic, miserable grunt.

There is no way. It will fit. It has to fit, right? It has to. We must be doing something wrong. Try a new angle, turn it around, upside-down, sideways. Let’s switch places. Lift that side a little more. Turn it clockwise. No, my clockwise.

It will not fit through the door.

Let’s try some extreme measures. Try another room – is it every doorway, or just this one? Take the door off its hinges. Turn it sideways again. Upside-down. Come at it with sheer force – Heave our entire bodyweight into it. Just. Keep. Push. Ing.

I muster up every ounce of strength I have and shove my entire self into the couch. My thigh knocks into the wooden frame at full-speed, and I cry out in agony. The bruise – thick and straight as a fencepost – has already begun to form.

It will not fit through the door.

All we could do was stare at the couch in absolute disbelief, shaking our heads and refusing to accept that it was possible.

And therein lies the question. How indeed, Furniture Manufacturers, can it be possible that you would design and sell a couch which does not fit through a standard doorway? I’ve done my research on this one, and our office door is no smaller than that of the average American household. Which means that you either:

a.) paid no mind to this small detail, thereby condemning half of your consumers to this same maddening predicament

b.) are part of some larger, malicious conspiracy to torture those of us who are too trusting of the fact that of course a company like yours would care enough to consider such things.

And so I stand here, bruised and bloody and apparently naïve, with too much faith in the world and not enough skepticism to bring a tape measure with me to the furniture store. It is my hope that you will take this letter as a plea, to spare others like me from this embarrassment and tremendous disappointment.

Thank you for your consideration,

Susie