Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Just Proved Everyone Struggles with Building IKEA Furniture
No matter who you are and where you come from, we can all agree that assembling IKEA furniture is a journey. On Wednesday night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leapt into her own DIY adventure—and we all got to experience it live from her apartment in Washington, D.C.
AOC got sworn in on January 3 of this year, but she admitted to the public that her apartment has yet to be furnished. As of yesterday, she just got her first shipment of IKEA furniture delivered to her apartment. Instead of building it alone, AOC took her Instagram followers along for the ride by going live on Stories. Not only that, she also opened up the floor for questions while she worked, wine and popcorn in hand.
As AOC began opening the box to build a tray table (the GLADOM, which we named a new classic), she looked at the instructions and claimed that it looked fairly easy. Early on she provided a “problem-solving tutorial,” which she learned when studying economics.
“No matter what problem you’re trying to solve, it’s always a really good idea to organize your givens first,” she said. “If you have a complex problem in front of you, always either write down or organize your givens—the set facts that you know about a situation—and you just write down the known variables. It’s just a very long way of saying I’m going to put the IKEA pieces in front of me so I can look at them.”
After answering a few politically driven questions from the audience, she continued to bring the tray table to life. AOC held up one of the legs and the circular frame of the table and said “what am I doing here?” while humming circus tunes. She quickly figured out how to crisscross the legs in order to make the bottom frame of the table.
As she started connecting the two rods at the top with a screw, AOC gave some invaluable IKEA advice she had received from another wise soul. “You screw everything in and then you leave the last couple of turns unturned, maybe two or three, and then insert all of the other [screws]. Then you tighten them all in alignment—it helps you not break everything.” After adding the circular table on top of the frame and proclaiming “BOOM,” she admitted that there was something very satisfying about building IKEA furniture. We couldn’t agree more.
Then she moved on to building a desk; after grabbing some Motts fruit snacks, she laid out her givens and got to work. As she unloaded all the various pieces from the large box, she let out a large sigh, saying “there’s a lot of pieces in this one.” She made the rookie mistake of asking her audience to vote on whether or not she should use screwdrivers to assemble the desk, the majority of which voted NO. Good luck with that, Cortez!
Compared to the ease of the tray table, she was off to a rocky start by not being able to locate the legs. Did IKEA forget to send those in the package?! Even the thought of the possibility had us sweating.
Rest assured, they were located in another box. However, we might never find out if she was able to complete mission impossible (a.k.a. not using a screwdriver) because the live video cut off at Cortez ripping open another cardboard box. But one thing is for certain: we’re all human, and everyone struggles with an IKEA build from time to time.
Today, she’s hanging with the Fab Five, so maybe Bobby can lend a hand.