Crude But Effective

The bookshelf I bought 3 years ago is looking to be quite filmsy. Within a year one of the shelves had already broken up. The material that they used to make this shelf is quite remarkable, it's very light and very strong, and this is probably the biggest bookshelf I've ever seen. But the bookshelf is only as good as its weakest point, and in this case some of the weakest points are the pins that are holding the bookshelf together.

It may have been due to my pushing that bookshelf 20 cm to the right in order to rearrange my room 1 month back, but some of the pins were no longer holding up the bookshelves, and they were now resting on the lower shelves. The pins are intact, but the holes where the pins were resting were sagging and were no longer holding the pins in their proper place.

I tried to match the broken pins to the broken shelf, and change the positions of the shelves, so that the pins were placed in fresh holes. In this way I got to salvage all but 1 shelf. This operation involved moving out 3 shelves of books. I was about to finish the operation, when one of the shelves got stuck when I tried to move it out. After yanking out the shelf forcefully, I found out that one of the pins was missing.

Afterwards I tore my hair out trying to locate the missing pin. Without the pin, it seemed that I would not be able to put the shelf back. After messing up half of my room in the process, I gave up and tried to look for other solutions. I found that we had other pins, and they belonged to the other type of bookshelf. But these pins were larger and fatter than those for this bookshelf. Eventually, I found a solution. The ruptured holes were bigger, and using a hammer, I forced the larger pin into the hole. (I know this sounds like kinky sex but bear with me. This is like an Asian woman having sex with a black man.) Turns out that the bookshelf is made of soft plywood, which allowed me to do crazy stuff like that. So I bashed the large pins all the way in. To my immense surprise, the whole thing worked.

This has confirmed in my mind that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved by violence. Using a hammer and bashing your way through is truly the way to solve all problems. When they knighted Sir Alex Ferguson, they gave him a CBE, and I always thought that it refers to his methods of man-management: crude but effective.

So I have a properly functioning bookshelf again. Which is good. But now my room is in a mess.

Edit: found the !@#$ missing pin but I still think the CBE fix was necessary.