Two tall, broad panels, approximately eight feet tall and six feet wide, are positioned parallel to each other at center stage, their narrowest ends facing the audience. They are a little over two and a half feet apart. Visible at the upstage end of the corridor created by the panels is a large, rectangular wooden table, approximately two and a half feet wide. The table might fit down the corridor, but it is really hard to tell. 

Kate enters with a wrench-like tool and walks over to the table. She carefully maneuvers the table upside down so the legs are up in the air. She sits down next to the table. While she talks, she undoes the nuts and bolts holding the table together. 

Kate: In my apartment is a tiny corridor, similar to this one, that leads to a small bedroom. I’ve moved things in and out of this room a number of times and everything has to fit down this corridor if I want it in that room.

Even though I have moved this table in and out of that room on a number of occasions, I don’t automatically disassemble it when I’m ready to move it. Instead, I think to myself, I bet it will fit. It starts really promisingly. I make a little progress down the corridor, and I feel pretty clever. But, eventually, I run into a problem. The moulding. The door frame. The slight slope in the floor. I turn the table all kinds of directions trying to just get it past the thing that is just a millimeter too thick. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, I usually find myself awkwardly trapped in a tiny corridor with a table that is too big to fit down it. 

Eventually, I have to take off the legs and move it the way I already knew I should. 

When Kate finishes undoing the nuts and bolts, she pulls the legs off the table, carries them down the corridor and sets them on the stage. Then, she slides the table top down the corridor and rests it on the stage near the table legs. 

Kate sits down on the stage and begins to reassemble the table. 

Kate: I’d like to think that trying to fit the table down the corridor is a display of sunny optimism, a can-do spirit. A willingness to keep trying even under difficult circumstances. But I know that’s a load of horse shit. I get stuck in that corridor because I’m trying to take the easy way out. I don’t want to waste time taking a table apart. I’m streamlining my life! I’m organizing my shit! I’m rearranging things to suit my new grand plan for productivity and optimized output! This is exciting and important work!

Nothing quite gets in the way of your new exciting, streamlined, home-perfectly-arranged life than having to find the wrench thing and turn the table upside down and fiddle with washers and nuts. 

Kate finishes tightening the last few nuts on the table legs. 

Kate: I don’t even think disassembling and reassembling takes as much time as I think it does. 

Kate turns the table up on its legs. 

Curtain.