Monday, November 12, 2007

Miss Hacksaw: The jolliest hockey stick in the box

Today has been the most successful day ever. IKEA delivered when they said they were going to! The plumber came and fixed the shower pump, as certain people can't get out of the bath without some sort of zimmer-type appliance any more! The scaffolders removed the scaffolding that prevented us from receiving a Sky signal for the last four weeks, so that I no longer think I am living in some sort of Amish reality show! Junior Hacksaw has four heart chambers and a normal spine, plus various other pleasing features! My hormones have sent me completely crazy!

Heh. Fear not, I've not turned into Jean Slater, as the paragraph above may suggest. In truth, the fact that IKEA delivered stuff when they were instructed to has been enough to send me skipping (for that you can read waddling quickly) around the flat in a state of high excitement.

The Hubbo and I realised we'd not had an argument for a few months, and therefore decided a trip to IKEA to buy a sideboard was the best remedy for that. Actually, things went tremendously - apart from ending up with a Billy With Doors instead of an actual sideboard. It's the law to buy a Billy when you go to IKEA, so I don't care. We also managed to buy the wardrobe for the nursery without too many mishaps, apart from me nearly biffing the wardrobe genius one for not being able to tell the difference between wardrobe heights. We even managed to get through the blasted market place without one of us picking up anything more untoward than a new floor lamp (as opposed to the usual "WE DON'T NEED A TEA STRAINER BECAUSE WE DON'T USE TEA LEAVES" type argument one sees every couple having in the market place at one time or another.)

The problems began when we entered the dreaded Vault of Flatpack, Where No Staff Dareth Enter. Or something. Seriously, you can't move for bloody IKEA staff stocking up the tealights and plumping sofa cushions, but the minute you need them for something, i.e getting the furniture down from the 12 foot high place where it lives, they all bugger off for meatballs and herrings leaving you to teeter precariously on your husband's shoulders while you hoof a two stone flatpack bookcase off the shelf.

It's not that we argued as such, it's just that when the idiots put aisle 2 along the back of the shop instead of in between aisles 1 and 3, as any sane shop designer would suggest, the Hubbo rather lost patience with the entire fiasco and blamed me for not reading the aisle map right. However, it turns out that growing another head inside you has the side effect of developing a fairly monstrous temper, so I made it clear to him that we could either blame each other and fight this out until the end of time in the middle of Swedish flatpack hell; or we could find a member of staff and give them some temperamental customer feedback on the spot. We found one rather quickly (hiding behind a yucca plant from a customer whose wife had just been flattened by a Benno CD rack) and proceeded to give said feedback, which I'm sure has been noted and is being actioned upon as we speak.

After all this fandango I wasn't expecting said furniture to actually turn up when we asked for it to (after having to pay a storage fee of £10 A NIGHT, damn crooks), but it did and I now have a place for all the baby clothes, and storage. Must ixcillent! Bork bork bork!

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Bork bork bork

Sorry for the continued absence. As ever, there are no excuses. Back tomorrow with an undignified rant about IKEA.