There is a store whose name when mentioned to most men folk I know strikes fear and anxiety into them instantly. A Swedish hellscape that smells like sweet cinnamon and lingonberry. Ikea. This store, as far as I am concerned was envisioned by Beelzebub and his cronies as a sample platter of the transition from purgatory to hell. A systematic maze of furniture and knick-knacks with names that anyone with a southern accent should never try to pronounce. A place where you enter and have no idea where you’re going, when you’ll get out, and what condition you will be in if you ever do.
The first time I ever went to an Ikea I was falsely enchanted by its Siren Song. I had never heard of the place and my wife took me there. I thought it was amazing. We were poor college graduates at that point. The only furniture I owned had been passed down from my parents and had holes that pecans fell out of leftover from a pet squirrel. For less than a hundred dollars I could get rid of that old thing and have a brand new sofa that only rose 2 inches from the ground!
I do not want to know how much money I have spent in this store in hopes that I would be able to make my living space look anything close to what they have on display. But, every. single. time. I go to put this stuff together I mess it up. Why? Because it is cheap junk. And do not be fooled by their higher-end ‘real’ wood stuff. It’s junk too. I once spent 12 hours putting together one of their high-end storage cabinets only to realize I did it backward and was yet again duped by these Swedish con-artists.
I made a vow the last time I was there that I would NEVER go again, but sometimes life comes at you. Since we now have to deal with COVID and the adventure my wife is about to embark on teaching our son 1st grade, we needed a desk. Nobody wants to spend hundreds of dollars on a desk for a kid. Normally we would have just found one at a yard sale or something but there isn’t much time before school starts and we weren’t willing to take the chance. So where do we go? Ikea of course!
A few weeks ago we head down there in full PPE to get a desk but the line was out the door and around the building. They were only letting a few folks in at once. We went back home and decided to come back early the next day so we could get in, and get out. We navigate the labyrinth, pick out the desk, and get all the numbers so we can go search for it in the enormous warehouse of confusion and misery. With Ikea crap you can’t get what you want in one box, they’re all separate, so we get the tabletop for the desk, but the legs are nowhere to be found. Oh well, we thought, we’ll just get them online. No sir. The legs for this desk are nowhere in these great states of America...but check back soon!
Every single day since then, it’s been about a month, my wife has checked to see if these stupid legs were in stock. She checks about five times a day, maybe more. This morning I am woken up to the smell of food cooking and her whistling a tune in the kitchen...If breakfast is cooking during the misery of this current apocalypse I know something is up. Guess what dear, the legs are in stock...but there are only 12.
Something we have both learned about living in this city is that if there is a limited quantity of anything you best get your ass in gear. I head down there as fast as I can and get there an hour before this place opens, and there are at least 500 people standing in line. Are they for table legs? Who the heck knows. So my wife sends me a map with a marked route to get the legs. And I stand out in the direct August morning sun, in Atlanta, Georgia, in a black t-shirt, in front of a monstrosity of metal building that is painted a deep blue sucking every UV ray out of the sky, holding my breath as to not contract a virus, slowly melting.
By the time the line started moving there was a puddle underneath my feet where every ounce of liquid had been cooked out of my body. When I finally got in the sweet-smelling cinnamon hell I saw a line of housewives go directly for the table legs. Luckily I was able to muster enough energy to jump over a crate of salmon paste and a wicker furniture display to get the last one of these table legs. They’re called PÅHL but my translator tells me I should call them what they really are, Svensk Tortyr. Swedish torture.