Ikea = hell with trolleys

Naturally this was a misplaced hope. Alison does go there by herself, but I have also made more visits to Ikea than I would have had it stayed in its remote isolation. I have spent more time there than ever I would have had they never opened the damn place. I suppose this was inevitable, though I had greatly hoped it would prove otherwise.

The Cov branch is a reduced version but it is infuriatingly designed to mirror their other stores. Thus you meander slowly in the pattern of a drunk heading home, weaving randomly between obstacles, but without the pleasure of being drunk. It is of course a slow progress as it's impossible to get around the other fools forced to shop there. Slowly you trudge in a forlorn formation, like a pack of rats seeking a microbe of cheese or the damned marching into the descent of a fiery hell.

Yesterday's tortuous visit may provide some glimmer of redemption; having spent 90 minutes there, at least a third of which was in waiting time, I think that even Alison is beginning to tire of the experience. We had gone to purchase a bed for our daughter, she'd outgrown her last Ikea bed - or so I was told. Kids have this annoying habit of growing.

Of course you can't just buy a bed at Ikea, like everything there it comes in parts. There's the headboard and foot, the middle and side-posts, the slats beneath the mattress and the mattress itself. All of these items are located in different places, there are choices of mattresses and slats and some parts you have to locate yourself in the warehouse whilst others have to be collected from a separate point.

The mattress was the most unwieldy part of the bed we ordered, but we still had to collect this ourselves, manhandling it down from a shelf onto a trolley to go alongside the mid and side-posts. Naturally all of the items were too big for the trolley, so I had to steer it one-handed with my face planted firmly in the side of the mattress.

Then we queued to pay, and queued, and queued, alongside similar idiots who'd gone in for things they didn't really need, ending up buying more of everything than they needed in the vain hope that they wouldn't have to come back anytime soon. Whilst queuing I had to flip the mattress so that the bar code would be facing the till operator, a person not known as a cashier or assistant, but in Ikea-speak a 'co-worker'.

In what world or in whose idea of language is co-worker a more agreeable term than assistant? Co-worker makes me think of Dilbert and drones in cubicles, it is a non-word for non-people. Are all co-workers created equal, or is their Stalin-esque name intended to make them feel that way? It doesn't work, it is an abuse of English far greater than the Ikea-names given to their products - at least we understand that they (Jarren, Hemnes, Hagavig, etc) might have some meaning in whatever branch of purgatory it was that Ikea originated. These are the things you get time to fester over whilst waiting in an Ikea queue.

Then I paid and went to queue again in the collections department, for the bits of bed I couldn't collect in self-serve. I went to queue with some of the same people I'd already queued alongside, possibly for some of the same products. They told me it might be fifteen minutes wait, it was.

Finally - of the three items I was anticipating - they delivered one. Leaving me with five of the seven pieces I needed to complete the one bed. Apparently they'd over-sold, and didn't have them in stock. This was a fact that presumably could've been discovered on the computerised stock system upstairs, used to order the items prior to payment. Naturally that would make too much sense.

The solution? I had to go to customer returns on floor four to get a refund on the item they couldn't supply. Having now spent too much time in two queues I had to wait for their ridiculously slow lifts to take all my items on their unwieldy trolley up to customer services, get a number and wait some more. They said it'd be two minutes wait, it was six.

At that point of tearing my hair out I had to stand and observe one co-worker educating another co-worker in how to attend to my 'issues'. They were keen to give me a refund for the items missing, but I was beyond that point - explaining that I had no desire to re-visit the store in order to finish buying the two final pieces of a bed. They could either find and deliver the missing items or take the whole lot back. I explained this as diplomatically as I was capable, and at no time offered to stick their mattress where the sun doesn't shine......though the temptation to do so was very great.

Tomorrow they're delivering five sevenths of the bed. At some future point they'll deliver the rest free of charge, as long as they remember to do so. I suspect I'll have to spend time on the phone reminding them of this, after being held in a queuing system of course. I have vowed never to set foot in Ikea again, but I know this is unlikely and that at some point I'll have forgotten all their evils and need an urgent reminder. I do need a mattress for my Ikea bed after all.

Here every week
Randomly here and there