How To Assemble An IKEA Manual

You can't go far setting up a house with do-it-yourself furniture without running into an IKEA instruction manual.

The most generic instruction is this:

What could be clearer, eh? It says you should start with a cheerful greeting,"A hammer screwdriver pencil to you!" when you begin. It might actually mean something in Swedish, considering that Dag Hammarskjöld is an authentic Swedish name (The UN secretary-general guy who tried but couldn't put things together). Then it tells you to eliminate the unhappy man kneeling beside the broken box. You should leave the other man alone, the one smiling because he's got a carpet to kneel on and his box is not broken. Finally, if you don't know what those two shapes mean, stand outside IKEA and use a phone with a really long cord. Someone will tell you that it is an inclined plane, and you will be happy to learn the answer.

Obviously, I'm not the only one to have wicked interpretations of IKEA's well-meaning wordless instructions. Here's what someone else thinks:

And we haven't even got started on the names.

They just have to have all those umlauts or whatever they're called in Swedish, don't they? Now that's enough to unleash the Internet's creative talent.

Here's a smörgåsbord of parodies. (And that is an honest-to-goodness Swedish word.)

 Now you know where the phrase "turning the house upside-down" came from.

And that's the correct way to do it! 

That's how you find the Higgs Bösøn, I'm sure.

And the Science Fiction crowd is not to be outdone.

Båk to the Fütür

Stär Wårs

Døctor Whö - the right way

Døctor Whö - the wrong way

And then there are the truly wicked ones with a healthy dose of dark humour:

This wouldn't work as well in black-and-white...

Now this is bound to, ahem, crack you up.

This one has more turns than an Allen Key

Finally, it seems someone had enough of IKEA itself!

I'm sure there's more out there, but these were enough to make my day.

Update April 2021: