Boom boom boom, let's shake the room.

There was a big earthquake while I was at the gallery today and it did this to the office:



Well....

Actually....

Just kidding!

I cunningly cropped the photo so that you couldn't see the books which hadn't fallen off the other shelves. Basically, the brown shelves had been sagging for some time and one had even collapsed, and so the directors had already ordered in some new, stronger ones which were delivered today. Having been assigned the job of assembling the new shelves, I spent most of my afternoon strutting around the gallery with a powerdrill, asserting my straightness. Then I heard a crash and a scream from the office, and this is what I actually saw when I came in:





Someone must have given the brown shelves the last little push they needed before they gave up and the entire set of five shelves had come crashing down. You can even see two of the measly little pegs that were holding them up. The new shelves are properly screwed in - WHO'S the man?!

The new shelves also came with little hard-plastic straps which you screw onto the top of the cabinet and into the wall so that in the event of an (actual) earthquake, the books may fall off, but at least the cabinet won't topple over and kill you. The weird thing about all this was that not long after I arrived in the morning, before I even knew that the new shelves were being delivered, I was looking at the old cabinets thinking about suggesting to the directors that we buy some of those plastic straps because they were a towering death-trap. The irony also is that exactly the same collapse-due-to-overweight happened at the gallery while I was there last year and these crappy brown shelves were already replacements for a previous lot!