This problem came up a while ago. In my line of work a lot of things have come up that I'd figure would be intuitive but weren't, same as this stand. I slid the pieces into place and didn't give it a second thought. I found it neat that the circular parts fit into eachother so you could dump it into your pocket in one neat package as well. I'm only 26, maybe this came from playing with Transformers as a kid and never reading the instructions first Weird that it's absent from the instruction manual too.