Higgs boson the Ikea way

This is probably an older one, but I've only stumbled upon it today:

The ultrahigh beam vacuum is not included and has to be purchased separately.

Have they really perfected airtight Melamine?

it's little touches like the allen wrench that really make it for me

And that there are 9 million dowels. I built a wardrobe from Ikea that was only marginally less complex than a large hadron collider. I knew I was in trouble when the delivery men had me sign for 73 boxes.

Chances are there will one dowel short!

We had IKEA build and install kitchen cabinets in our house. The bill of materials was four pages long and it took the sales person about an hour and a half to write it up.

But that's just technology. 25 years ago a drawer would have just been a wooden box with a handle, which slid in and out. Now it's a wooden box on a metal/plastic framework which rolls in and out on wheels and stays loosely held in place when it's closed. That's a lot more complicated than just a box, and each of the drawers accounted for a whole lot of entries in the parts list.

Bear Bibeault wrote:Chances are there will one dowel short!

"Vanna, I'd like to buy a dowel."

I just looked at it again and noticed it also includes an infinite number of hydrogen ions, aka protons.

We found, by chance, that there are other instructions on the same page. Ruth was particularly taken by the one for “bäbby”

Paul Clapham wrote:We had IKEA build and install kitchen cabinets in our house. The bill of materials was four pages long and it took the sales person about an hour and a half to write it up.

But that's just technology. 25 years ago a drawer would have just been a wooden box with a handle, which slid in and out. Now it's a wooden box on a metal/plastic framework which rolls in and out on wheels and stays loosely held in place when it's closed. That's a lot more complicated than just a box, and each of the drawers accounted for a whole lot of entries in the parts list.

We had a guy build our kitchen and when it came to the "how can we make our dream cheaper" bit of the conversation, it was basically down to drawers, less cost = less drawers.
So even if they just looked like boxes they are still damn hard to make well.