When Furniture Attacks - The Hardest Stuff to Move

We humans aren't built to scale well, apparently. We need furniture that's ten times heavier than any of us can be expected to move. Other creatures happily scuttle by us, able to carry all that they need on their backs. Ants can pick up ten times their body weight. Yet here we are, needing a chair that weighs more than we d just to hold us up.

Probably the most vicious piece of furniture you can deal with is the sofa-bed combo. Sure, there's furnishings that are heavier, there's some that are more awkward, but none of them beat the sofa-bed for sheer devious design. In the first place, it's built to fold out into a full bed. That means if you pick it up and tilt it in any way, it tried to unfold like a manic Transformers robot, Couchtron, flipping and flopping out to fill any dimension it can. With a will of its own, it expands at the worst possible times, such as when two people are trying to get it upstairs.

But then, you'd have to be pretty devious to come up with a sofa-bed in the first place. Typical for dual-purpose furniture, it makes neither a very comfortable couch nor a particularly restful bed. Then to do this, it requires the space of a couch and enough spring-loaded folded metal inside to make a whole new house, if you go by weight.

Recliner chairs are another kind of furniture that's prone to attack when provoked. Starting from their basic shape, the foot-rest flips out and the back leans out in the other direction. Usually this action is controlled by some kind of level mechanism mounted on the side, so you think you can wrestle the chair around without too much trouble. But you weren't taking into account the corner you're going to have to turn, where that level is a hair-trigger bringer of disaster, just waiting for a light bump to send the chair's foot-rest through the wall.

Some furniture, rather than attack you, prefers to commit suicide instead. It is amazing how an apparently sturdy table, desk, or set of shelves will stand for years without an issue, yet collapse like wet lettuce once you try to move it. Of course, when it chooses its time to go, it will try to take out as many other pieces of furniture with it as it can. There's usually a good opportunity when it's sitting in the row behind the moving van. With the right timing, it can collapse and take out two lamps and a china cabinet.

Some furniture items have the natural defense of appearing to be cooperative, while actually possessing cunning skills that help it escape. For instance, you think that a bean bag chair can be comfortably slung over the top of everything else, after the truck is loaded. And it can, but it's not going to stay there. Like a living blob, it will slowly shift and ooze off the top of the credenza, always seeking the lowest ground. You think this is a fluke, so you grab it and throw it back up there again. And it will find another way to tumble back down. No, it is not your imagination: it really is laughing at you.

Some items are a disaster to move only if they get spilled. In this age of electronic entertainment, I have acquired a Go board - that's that Japanese game with the black and white round pieces on the wooden board with a grid that you see in movies like "A Beautiful Mind". Well, more so than checkers or chess pieces, a bowl of Go pieces will evade every attempt to corral them should they be spilled. They bounce, roll, skitter, and slide, and their squashed-sphere shape gives them the unique ability to roll in the path of any Bezier curve you could draw, guaranteeing that they'll find their way under the fridge, behind the entertainment center, and through the heating vent.

The obvious killers are the large appliances. Not only are washers and dryers both heavy and awkward to transport, but a washing machine just doesn't seem to ever settle in after it's been moved to a new place. The floor never seems to match up with its feet, and it will therefore gallop along the floor whenever it hits the spin cycle. You can wedge little pieces of paper under one leg or another - this is what junk mail is for - but to no avail; the best you can do is change the direction of its next journey. Just be glad it can't figure out how to drive the car, or it would make a clean escape with your credit card.

Maybe we can get a few documentaries made to sell on late night TV. Because there's horror and mayhem - when furniture attacks!