https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/21349_Tuxedo_Cat
I saw this in a magazine and got it as a holiday present for my uncle yesteryear. This thing has been a pain in the ass since I got it. I remember the evening when it was lethally cold outside and we slowly walked into the shopping mall (which was playing abysmal music) to pick up a copy. I was annoyed being in the LEGO shop and bringing it home, but whatever. That was just ill luck.
I started assembling it a day or two later. It was very boring: the process of assembling it takes several hours, and at one point I had to stop working on it for a day because I was so bored (and sweaty) putting it together. Seriously, has anybody ever noticed how boring it is to assemble a LEGO set that has over a thousand pieces? I don’t mind a few hundred pieces, but a thousand or more is obscenely excessive.
Anyway, after I finished assembling it and giving it to my mom so that she could gift it, I thought that that would be the end of it. Nope. Some prick released a third-party add-on that hooks lights up to the set and my mom insisted on buying that. We returned to my uncle’s house and I thought that applying the add-on would be easy enough, but the vague instruction book (written in broken English) and my uncle’s real cat whining repeatedly caused me to leave his house in anger.
It was in-between this and the time when I finally installed the add-on that I learned that one of my uncle’s students knocked over the set before trying to reassemble it, making the add-on’s instructions even harder to follow, and somehow my mom or my uncle lost a few LEGO pieces in his car. That thing is almost as fragile as glass.
So after procrastinating for several days, I finally installed the fucking lights on the imperfectly reassembled and incomplete set and my mom takes it back to my uncle’s house. (She insisted that the add-on installation be secret because she wanted to ‘surprise’ him, but he undoubtedly wondered why it suddenly went missing, so my mom must have spoiled the surprise.)
Fast-forward a few months and I get a text from my mom asking where the instruction manual is because they somehow lost it (WHAT‽); the set needs to be reassembled again and this time she is going to use glue even though the LEGO Group discourages that, and I’m not doing it myself because she knows that I’m fucking sick and tired of handling that overpriced heap of plastic.
I am so sorry that I ever got that set and I wish that I never got into LEGO. I hate LEGO now. Overpriced boxes of shit.
Come to think of it, I hate toys in general now, basically. Tom Hodgkinson can explain it for me.
