On moving day several years ago, my wife came to a very Solomonic conclusion: if we were ever going to get our couch, which was both incredibly large and incredibly stuck, around the bend in our new apartment’s hallway, it needed to be cut in half. And so I found myself on our new lawn, with curious new neighbours gathered round and rain clouds looming, frantically gnashing through the sofa’s inner structure with a ginormous, borrowed Swede saw.
There’s probably a formula for figuring out if your furniture will travel cleanly into your new place. (In advance, I mean. The simplest formula, of course, is picking up your chesterfield and seeing what happens.) Some way to plug in ceiling height and door width and boxspring flexion to see if Goodwill just landed itself a donation or not.
If there is, I’ve never heard of it. If there isn’t, I hope one is in the works. Perhaps Simon Blackburn, a mathematician at the University of London who two years ago published a formula for perfect parallel parking is days away from unveiling his Grand Unified Theory of This Had Better Work Or We’re Sleeping On The Front Lawn.
Until Dr. Blackburn publishes his findings, however, furniture manufacturers need to start building boxsprings, couches and other long, bulky items with a massage table-esque locking hinge right in the middle. One that could be unlocked when moving to allow things to bend around corners.
Even after Blackburn’s Formula becomes as widespread and memorable as Pythagoras’s theorem, hinged furniture would continue to sell well among the mathematically illiterate. According to my calculations, which are based solely on the number of LottoMax tickets purchased each week, this is a very large demographic. And seeing as how they’re mathematically illiterate, they can probably be duped into paying way more for the feature, upping the margin on each unit. All of which, dear furniture manufacturers, I would love to get a little taste of.
Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearinghouse of ideas we’re to lazy to develop ourselves.
