Oh doctor, I'm in trouble!

Help is at hand for those of you traumatised by the dreaded words "self assembly":

Miles Richardson has devised a formula to indicate how frustrating an item will be to assemble and wants manufacturers to use it to amend instructions, offering customers an idea of flat-pack traumas to come.

His PhD paper, Identifying the task variables that influence object assembly complexity, is published later this year.

It's good to see that our universities are producing useful research. My local Ikea hands out the business cards of a guy who will come to your house and assemble furniture for a fee of £25. I wonder where he went to college.