Sun, 22 November 2009
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I've been trying to think of the perfect literary work to describe what Andrew and I have been through with our latest household project. The Trial comes to mind.One thing is for certain, if Existentialists like Kafka and Beckett were alive today, they would be setting their works in IKEA… oh, and they wouldn't be fiction.
Two weekends ago, Andrew and I went to IKEA on a mission - find a closet.
Andrew and I actually 'inherited' the closet we've been using from the previous tenants. It's a white pressboard number on which two of the three drawers don't work, the bar that our clothes hang on sags and the whole structure lists to one side.
It's also way too small. Half of Andrew's clothes are living on a rack in the spare bedroom and half of mine are in a heap at the bottom of the closet. It did the job four the past two years, and it was free, but it's time to move on.
The IKEA closet of my dreams has been bookmarked in my catalogue for quite some time now so it wasn't a difficult choice. I had even checked the availability of the closet on the IKEA website the night before and everything was supposedly in stock.
We went to the 'closet help desk' and told the clerk what we wanted. Unfortunately the baskets that I wanted for my sweaters weren't in stock but she gave us the aisle numbers for the rest of the parts.
When we arrived at the aisle for the closet and doors – The doors were there. The closet was not.
We went to the warehouse information desk. The clerk there informed us that they had a shipment arriving tomorrow morning. Great, just what we had hoped to avoid – IKEA on Saturday… if only we knew the worst.
We had to make a trip to Antwerp on Saturday so we thought we would be smart and go to the IKEA there to pick up the missing baskets. We thought we were so smart…
First off, getting to the Antwerp IKEA involves some interesting Belgian road trickery that involves driving by the store about 8 times without actually being able to get to it, then diving across 47 lanes of traffic and into the tiniest parking lot in the free world.
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