Sometimes, there are “tests,” if you will, that can determine the strength of the marital union. These can appear at any time, without notice. As the man in the relationship, you must rise to these challenges to demonstrate your dedication to the peace and sanctity of the home and your place in it. These tests, large and small, must be met with determination and grit, to keep the union strong. Do not show fear. Take it like the man you hope to be. Loins girded, jaw set, chest out, fists clenched, prepare to be tested.
Obviously, I’m talking about:
“Honey, we need to go to IKEA.”
It’s hard to describe how many things about IKEA are awful, but in solidarity with XY’ers everywhere, and as a public service, I’ll take a stab at it. You’re most welcome, gents.
First, is the drive to get there. Here in the Denver area, it’s about 20 minutes if things go well. Most of it is on expressways clogged with lunatic drivers who will ensure that by the time you reach IKEA, you are psychologically primed to find the most trivial inconvenience supremely irritating. You will arrive with your craw filled. And IKEA has plenty of inconveniences in-store if you’ll pardon the pun.
When you reach the proximity of the gargantuan building, you are speeding on I-25, trying to cross several lanes of traffic to reach the exit. If, at this moment, you were to lose control of the car and careen off the tarmac to your right, you could crash into the back of the building. It’s that close.
However, you are nowhere near the entrance. That’s several football fields away, which you will reach by exiting the expressway and looping around through a business park until you reach the opposite side of the Swedish furniture cavern, where the parking garage is located, under the building.
Upon parking, it’s a short half-mile hike to the building’s actual entrance for people, where you ride an escalator up two storeys (look it up) in an immense glass lobby where you can look down at the humming traffic of I-25, which you just left alive. Be sure to take in the view because you will not see daylight again for the duration of your shopping experience.
The interior of the megastore was designed by a retail sadist whose aim was to guarantee that you couldn’t skip an aisle and potentially miss being exposed to every IKEA product. That’s why there are no aisles, but a Disneyesque serpentine walkway that meanders through the massive array of goods, all of the patrons walking in the same direction as if on the Small World torture ride.
There are, if you know where to look, small doorways where you can “cut through” to a further section of the looping thoroughfare, but this is frowned upon. I think they are actually there so homicidal husbands can find the shortest path to the exit and freedom before committing carnage.
To be fair, not everything at IKEA is bad. Their shopping carts have all four swivel casters which make for some fun hot-rodding. They are also designed to ride the escalators which is pretty cool.
By the way, don’t drink a lot of liquids before going to IKEA. To reach the restrooms, you need to escape the writhing snake of humanity, go to a lower floor, and then wend your way through the restaurant past people enjoying delicious Swedish meatballs, which you are not. Then find your loved ones again with a shopping cart now piled high with your lost weekends.
All the products have charming Swedish names such as Ombonad, Dammäng, Åkernejlika, Olgepalm, Knäckebröd Råg, Rösti, and Mackapär. (Word to the wise: I suspect, but can’t prove, they charge by the umlaut.)
We bought four Alex (boring!) desk drawer units.
I will hand it to those clever Swedes, they have packaging down påt. Everything fits in a carton in the most efficient way possible. When you open the end of the box, you hear a whooshing sound. That’s air being sucked into the box replacing the vacüum established in Malmö (I’m guessing) when it was packed so efficiently that no air escaped Sweden.
The executives at IKEA are evidently such skinflints that they won’t spring for the cost of printing instructions in English, even for a market the size of the ünited States, so they make you use silly pictograms of stunted, unisex figures, and numerous callouts, dotted lines, arrows, and other symbols instead of just telling you how the fück to put the thing together.
Here are the tools needed to attach 732 screws, bushings, metal and nylon eccentric cam locks, cross-dowel bolts, interior binding posts, furniture joint cônnector bolt-and-cap nuts, Pozidrive Euro screws, furniture assembly screws, bed frame cam locks, hinges, casters, handles, and shelf stops: 1 Phillips screwdriver and 1 tiny hex wrench.
Here is what you must supply to assemble the above-enumerated components: bruised knees, småshed fingers, skinned knuckles, profuse swearing, homicidal ideation, power tools, frequent breaks to smash things in the garage, and trips to the hardware store to replace stripped fasteners bëcaûse you are not supposed to use those power tools.
When you get to the hardware stôre (IKEA is 20 miles away), you will need to know the Swedish terms for the parts you’re looking for. For example, if you have a misaligned kvartal, you’ll need the 6mm fiídlibïts. To save some time later and avoid an embarrassing kniiptien in front of the kids, pick up the knüukelbüuster tool. If you’re not exactly sure what an item is called, ask the Friendly Hardware Fölkperson for a whûthifuük.
If all else fails, just say füuk this böolshittë and graciously accept the divorcė papers.
In my case, I successfully (eventually) assembled the four drawer modules and used them to replace spíndly legs that offered no storage on a pair of office desks. While admiring my work in which all the scratches, goūges, and stripped parts were in the back and unseen, it occürred to me that this kind of sacrifice, this labor to make another person happy, this profanity-lacêd, skinned-knuckle effort is how you show someone special that your löve is lasting and real.
Just then Lisa popped in to cheerily inform me of some great news:
Costco has an 8-by-ten-foot greenhouse kit on sale.