IKEA mon amour

Tomas Ahlbeck
3 min readAug 17

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OK, so we did it again. We went shopping at IKEA.
I love IKEA…or, love. Detest is more correct.
This time they beat their own record in customer contempt and ignorance.

Why are you in such a bad mood Tomas, you might ask.

OK, here goes:
After renting a truck to be able to transport all the furniture we were going to buy, we spent a humungus time cruising around inside the huge department store.
As we soon noticed it was not possible to fetch all the big heavy goods at the delivery area-why should it, that would have made things too easy-you had to fetch them yourself on a shelf somewhere out there in flatpack-land. Which meant-run around all across the warehouse and try to find the correct shelf which of course was numbered in a totally random order, you still hoping you in some way will find what you are looking for before bedtime-or death.

Some of the objects, however, you had to pick up in the delivery area. Of course, why be consistent? To us, this included a dining room table and two bed frames.

When we got to the checkout it was already five past six so they were closing. We presented the order slips on the bed frames and all the papers for the other stuff, and the girl behind the counter asked “can I throw the rest away or do you want to keep it?” I answered “yes”, since I thought it was risk free to dispose of some pieces of paper that already had been handled by the girl.

When we got to the delivery, it turned out that one of the papers she had thrown away was the order for one of the bed frames, and after spending 25 minutes trying to explain to the guy at the loading ramp that we had paid for two bed frames but there was only one, and his constant quacking about he needed ALL papers in order to fetch the missing bed frame from the inner dark domains of this shithole I certainly never would visit again and if he didn’t instantly fetched everything we had paid for, I would email the main office in wherever it was, he just spit out his snuff, said ”it’s closed now. Come back tomorrow” and went away.
We managed to bring the bedframe that was delivered to us, a 160 cm wide double bed frame, with us back home. So without further ado we filled the truck with three mattresses, a bedframe, four chairs, a dining table and some other knick-knacks we picked up on the way through the cestpit of hell.

After the standard four hours of work to get the crap together, and after getting a few screws over as usual (what’s this for then?) it was time to put the mattresses on the bed. Which of course didn’t fit.

OK, check things:
The order slip? Yes, it says 160 cm.
The receipt? Yes, we have paid for 160 cm.
The packing slip inside the box? Nah, sure enough, they’ve picked out a 140 cm instead.

So now we’re stuck with a 140 cm bedframe that we can’t use and that we have to rent a truck for SEK 500 to be able to replace, even though it’s IKEA and not us that made the mistake.

I am convinced AstraZeneca have part ownership in IKEA. Since that must be the major group of Losec customers — frustrated IKEA customers.

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Tomas Ahlbeck

Swedish Standup comedian, writer & diabetic. Published a few books, done a few gigs. ‘Sweden’s own dirty uncle, brilliant writing and some very dark humour.”