Well that was a mistake ...
June 4, 2005 at 3:42 PM
by Ashleigh
It all started off, quite innocently, with the desire to purchase a new sofa. I can hear you saying 'but there are lots of other sofa stores?'.
Yes, there are lots of other sofa stores.
No, it is not possible to purchase a sofa from one of those other stores if you want it in this lifetime.
Customer service in Holland is a complete misnomer - first, it assumes you are a customer, and secondly assumes that there is some service involved. When actually, all that is involved is you paying large sums of money for an item that may never appear. Hence Ikea.
I know people who ordered furniture in stores here, paid in full, and LEFT the country 3 years later without ever seeing their furniture! But I digress.
We went to Ikea intending to purchase a sofa. I found one I liked, he didn't like it. He said it was too 'big'.
He said that if we have that specific sofa then he cannot sit right in the centre of the sound field that his very expensive and mostly pointless speaker system generates. Of course, not being in the exact epicentre of the speaker system renders one incapable of hearing any of the movie or indeed deducing any of the plot line from the screen.
I countered this by saying that seeing as my hearing is perfectly normal (and of course I couldn't care less), I don't need to be in the exact centre of the sound system and thus he would now have two seats in which to position himself whilst I retreated to the far side of the new sofa - which conveniently has a chaise longue on my side.
The centre-of-the-speaker-system argument fell flat at the point and turned into the you-only-want-a-chaise-longue-because-you-are-a-slug argument. At which point I said the chaise could be on his side, but apparently that might interfere with the placement of his ears directly in the centre of the sound system.
I ended up getting my way with the sofa, but the morning went quickly downhill from there, with the DH not wishing to get himself something to eat because we arrived in that brief Ikea window between breakfast and lunch and the lunch things weren't out yet and the breakfast things were almost finished. The Smaland kids play room was full at 9.20 am so Seb couldn't play.
I just wish there was a Smaland for husbands.
'Yes, ma'am, just take off his shoes and his jacket and put them in this box. Here's his label and the stamp on your hand and you can collect him in an hour'
Hmm.