Theledge.net

From the title you might assume that we have remodeled the house to streamline our laundry workflow, and, while you could be forgiven, you would be wrong. Instead we took the amount of time it would normally take to do laundry and assembled a toy which Bettie received for Christmas. It is called “My Very Own Laundry Center”, made by American Plastic Toys and it requires some very specific skills and tools to assemble, specifically the skills and tools of an assembly line style toy maker.

Here is what it should look like when it is completed:

And, remarkably, it does look like that once we managed to get it assembled, except that nothing in our house is as unnaturally white as that background. I can’t blame the toy company for either the lighting in our house or for the “pile gnome” who feels that clear and open space is an abomination and piles large quantities of anything handy on top of every inch of free space imaginable. I own that, since all my traps have so far failed.

I can say that the toy maker, in this case, ships the product completely unassembled, in that the “assembly” required of the owners of this product (or owners parents, hopefully) starts at the step immediately after the injection molded plastic parts are cool enough to place in a box and ship to a store. Specifically, the non-professional assembler of this product will need to de-gate, trim, and then screw together all of the pieces, before applying the enclosed sticker kit. This added work is only a problem if you have a small child (say age “2+”) who knows nothing of the manufacturing process and has visions, based on the picture on the box, of entire vistas of laundry landscapes in which they can play.

This misinterpretation of “assembly” resulted in Angie and I cutting and assembling a small purple and pink plastic nightmare at the same time we were trying to cook dinner, all the time trying to fend off requests to play with various jagged, untrimmed plastic pieces. Fortunately, the instructions are well written and labeled well enough that Alphie was able to follow along with which steps we were on and provide helpful advice, like “Is part ‘Z’ part of an iron? Does this come with an iron!?!? That is crazy!!”

Both girls love it, though, and immediately began washing doll cloths. And the advanced understanding of assembly which they soaked up in the process isn’t bad, either, even if it has led to the occasional interruption in play punctuated by calls of “Mom! Part ‘R’ came off!”