Episode summary
A new TV sits on the floor for weeks because the IKEA stand in the garage looks like a long, hard job. It takes a screwdriver and an hour and a half.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless.
If this is your first time here, welcome. And if you’ve been here before, thank you for coming back. I’ve kept the tea warm for you. Today’s story may be a small one, but it took me quite a long time to get around to it.
For about three weeks, my mom’s brand-new TV sat on her living room floor, leaning against a wall like an introvert at a college party. The reason it was still down there was me. What it needed was in her garage, in boxes I had opened and then ran away from.
There’s a phrase for what I was doing. The phrase is: drag your feet.
Think of a kid being walked toward the dentist’s office. His head is hanging low, and his body language is almost shouting that he doesn’t want to be here. He’s not being carried. He’s still going. But his shoes are scraping the whole way, and a two-minute walk somehow takes ten. That’s dragging your feet. You are slow to start something, or slow to finish it, even though you’re going to do it. You’re just taking your sweet time getting to it.
Here’s how it might sound in real life. A friend complains, “My landlord has been dragging his feet about fixing our sink. It’s been three weeks.” Or you say it about yourself: “I’ve been dragging my feet on renewing my passport, and now my trip is six weeks away.” Notice that people often say dragging their feet on or about something, and the verb changes with the time. You can say drag, dragging, or dragged.
That was me. I wasn’t refusing to help my mom. I fully meant to. I just kept meaning to next week. So let me tell you how that TV ended up on the floor in the first place.
My mom moved here to Texas a few months ago. If you’ve ever made a big move, you know the boxes are only the first part. Then you have to unpack, and find a place for everything, and notice that the new space is different from the old one. So some things you brought don’t fit anymore, and you end up buying new things. It can be a long, drawn-out process.
About two months after she moved, she bought a new TV, and it’s the biggest one she has ever owned. It’s a seventy-five-inch mini LED Google Smart TV, much bigger than anything we had when I was growing up. She got a great price on it, too. Normally it’s a little over nine hundred dollars. She paid just under five hundred.
At the time, Emma’s brother and his wife were in town, and we had lent them our minivan so they could get to a few events. That meant we needed a different ride, so we borrowed a twelve-seater passenger van from Emma’s aunt and uncle. My mom and I met at Sam’s Club in separate cars, picked out the TV together, and loaded it into that enormous van. Then we drove to her house, unloaded it, plugged it in, connected it to the Wi-Fi, and had her sign into her Google account. Everything worked perfectly, with one problem. She had nothing to put it on, so we set it on the floor up against the wall.
Her living room has high vaulted ceilings, which means the ceiling rises up and up, like the inside of a church. Her walls go fifteen or twenty feet high, and there was a lot of empty wall space, since she hadn’t put anything against it yet. The TV fills that space pretty well, but it needed to sit higher, both for the viewing angle and for how it looks in such a big, open room. She didn’t want to mount it on the wall, so she needed something to set it on.
About a week and a half after the TV came home, she found a nice wide TV unit at IKEA, with drawers and little cubby spaces, and it still looks classy. But with IKEA, buying the furniture is only half of it. You still have to put it together. My mom couldn’t do it herself, so she asked me. I went over and looked at the pieces. I gave the instructions a quick glance, saw that they recommended two people and power tools, and told her it would probably take a few hours that I didn’t have that day.
That began weeks of procrastination, which is a fancy word for putting something off. The TV stayed on the floor for a little over a month in total, and the unit sat in the garage in its boxes for two and a half or three weeks of that. My mom would call and ask if I had time to put it together, and I would say, “I’m not sure.” “Let me check my schedule.” “Let me ask Emma if we have any plans.” “Maybe next week.”
I fully intended to do it. But in my mind, the project kept growing. It needed more and more time, and by then it didn’t seem like something I could just fit into any old Saturday, based on my idea of how hard it was going to be.
If you listened to the last episode, then you know that we had our church picnic on Saturday. I was part of the activity committee that planned it, and it was a lot of planning and a lot of effort. But it ran from the morning into the early afternoon, and we wrapped up with the cleanup around two o’clock. That left me a large chunk of the day remaining and nothing else demanding my attention. So, finally, I bit the bullet. It was time to get that IKEA TV unit put together. I came home, took a quick shower, and then headed over to my mom’s. I got there about three o’clock. I was ready to give this thing four hours or more. Emma was home with Eliana. We had our tools, we had the boxes opened and in the right place, and I started reading the manual.
That’s when I realized I might have misjudged this project. The power tools were only needed if we wanted to bolt the unit to the wall, and that was exactly what my mom did not want to do. So we could do the whole thing with a screwdriver. The parts were designed to join together firmly and easily.
IKEA’s instructions are all pictures. Most of the time that works fine. But a couple of the pictures just weren’t clear enough, and those were real head-scratchers. The only way to solve them was to try a piece and see what worked. Luckily, those moments were few and far between.
My mom and I worked as a team. I read the instructions and put together the larger pieces. I would point to a spot, and she would turn the screws and push in the wooden pegs. Between the two of us, we finished in an hour and a half.
Then we lifted the television onto the unit, plugged it in again, and made sure everything was in a good spot for comfortable viewing. It was so much easier than I had made it out to be. In my head, this had been a big ordeal, which means a long, hard experience, the kind that costs you time, sweat, and patience. It turned out to be pretty straightforward.
Which brings me to the part I had wrong.
Dragging my feet was only half the story. The other half has its own phrase: make a mountain out of a molehill.
Have you ever seen a molehill? A mole is a small animal that digs tunnels underground, and every so often it pushes up a little heap of dirt on somebody’s lawn. You could step right over it. Now imagine a homeowner who finds one, gasps, calls a family meeting, and starts pricing out surveyors and heavy equipment. A big reaction for such a tiny issue. That’s the phrase. When you make a mountain out of a molehill, you take something small, like a problem or a task, and build it up in your mind until it feels enormous. The mountain isn’t real, and that’s the point. It’s about your perception, meaning how you see the thing, and how that might differ from the reality.
Here’s how it might sound in a real conversation. Say your friend’s boss answers her long email with one word: “Thanks.” No smiley face. She’s now sure she’s about to be fired. You might gently say, “I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” You can also say it to yourself: “One piece of toast burned. That doesn’t ruin the whole morning. Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” Like the first phrase, it changes with time: make, making, made. One small warning. If someone is really worried, this phrase can sound dismissive, so say it in a kind voice, or keep it for yourself.
That’s what I did. I looked at “two people” and “power tools” on a set of instructions I had barely read, and I decided this would swallow my whole afternoon. Later, when I actually read the manual all the way through, I realized it wasn’t the mountain I had been imagining it to be. It was a pretty manageable molehill.
As is the way of most imaginary problems, every week I waited, the mountain got a little taller, and every week that made it easier to keep waiting.
Before I go, I’d like to leave you with a question to carry around this week. Think of one job you’ve been putting off. Now ask yourself where its size came from. Did you ever actually measure it, or did you make a guess once and then get comfortable living with that guess? If you’re curious, try ten minutes on the first small piece, and see how the job looks afterward. Then tell me, or tell a friend over a cup of tea, what you found out.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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