あかん

That's 関西ー弁 (kansai-ben) for "insert expletive here".

So I've had this wooden clothes drying rack since I was in college. Probably since I was a freshman in college, who knows. Regardless, it's been good to me up until this point in my life, and it's technically still functional, but it's got a more pronounced lean to the left with each passing use, so I thought it was time to retire it to "backup" and get myself a new one. Since I had only recently discovered the wonders of clearance groceries at my second favorite local business, and since I also needed things like toilet paper and cat litter, I took a brief venture to the Eagan Target (I was in Eagan watching the Twins/Rays game on Haru's parents' RIDICULOUSLY GIANT television with HD cable while they were out of town) while waiting for the dryer to finish so we could pack up and head home.

After a brief detour for adventures in clearance groceries, I located the drying racks. There was a short-ish wide-ish pre-assembled aluminium variety, which was the kind I wanted to get. There was also the "assemble it yourself" (though I didn't know I had to assemble it myself) wooden variety, which also came in aluminium.

Because it was the cheapest and because I'd had the old trusty vinyl coated wooden kind for going on 9 years now, I decided to get the wooden one. Again, nowhere did it claim that I had to assemble it. Though looking at the size of the box, I don't know how I didn't think I'd have to. But I got it home, and I got the box open after wrestling with the excessive box glue for about 5 minutes, and dumped all the pieces on the floor. At which point I realized that this rack was a "some assembly required" variety. F. All I wanted to do was hang up my wet sweaters. But, with a little assistance from the cat and absolutely no assistance from the worthless package directions, I managed to get the thing assembled in about 15 minutes. Which, considering it's a flipping clothes drying rack, seemed like an unreasonable amount of time, but whatever. So now you know I was already going into the game angry. Once assembled, I noted that the rack seemed about as sturdy as the one that I'd been using in it's current "leans slightly to the left" state, but I figured it was new and it knew what it was doing (plus the apartment leans slightly to the left), so I chalked it up to normalcy and proceeded to hang my clothes.

Just as I'd gotten ALL my sweaters on the rack, I noticed that the left side had sunk down even farther from it's original lean. As I was trying to correct the problem, the accordion piece on the left side snapped in two, and the entire rack collapsed down........with my finger between the accordion. I (calmly) mentioned to Haru that my finger was pinched, he extracted it and then looked at it. It was ALSO very clearly collapsed in on itself. I informed him that I wasn't entirely unconvinced that I hadn't broken it and then told him that it was going to be handy if I couldn't bend the middle finger on my right hand while I went back to Target to talk to the high schooler at customer service and explained to him or her why I needed to return the drying rack. He gave me the Hello Kitty ice pack, drove me to Target to get the aluminum (already assembled) rack, bought me an Ocean Water from the Sonic, and I think I'm gonna come out of this one without having to go on the DL.

But I'm still pissed at Target's crappy drying rack.

And my finger hurts like a motherf*cker. But not enough to stop me from typing this really long entry to tell you all about my misadventures in laundry.