fitting a square peg into a round hole


When we moved into our flat last year I decided to switch dining tables.  Our old set was inherited from the previous tenant whose flat SB had subleased when he moved here and it was miserably uncomfortable.  My posterior quarters actually went numb during Thanksgiving dinner in 2009.  I found a replacement set online from an expat who was leaving Hong Kong.  The viewing times for her moving sale were during my office hours so I would be buying it sight unseen but it was originally purchased from G.O.D. so I went to the store to view it there.  The store no longer carried the same set but had a similar one with zebra wood and I liked it a lot.  However, when the second hand set was delivered it became clear that the table was much, much bigger than the one I had viewed at G.O.D.  It took up almost the entire dining area!  One of the movers looked at me with a deadpan expression and suggested that I could move it to the bedroom and place a mattress on top.  We kept it in the dining area even though it significantly reduced the space.  In the meantime I have heard endless comments from SB besmirching my architectural abilities.

Recently my firm has upgraded our printers.  The new color plotters arrived last week and are slightly larger than the previous ones, taking up a bit of the aisle in the printing shop.  The last of the copiers was supposed to be installed today but we ran into a problem: it does not fit.  The ink cartridges alone are larger than my personal printer.  The thing is so large that it would not fit through the opening of the office and even if it did, it would take up all of the circulation space.  It is about the size of a small car.

There is not much worse than the sight of half a dozen architects standing around with measuring tape and scratching their heads.

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