IKEA Debacle

The Look of IKEA Defeat

It just so happened that my two best friends, Mike and Rob, moved in together this summer, around the same time that I moved into my own studio. IKEA sells cheap furniture, so between the three of us, we have made a dozen trips over the past few months to this "some assembly required" (aka "build it yourself") furniture mecca.

Despite July being eaten away by hospital visits and doctor appointments, my apartment has been steadily coming along. Recently, Mike and I decided it was time I get a couch and a kitchen island; so off to IKEA we went... a routine as familiar as putting on your shoes before walking out the door.

By now, we have visited IKEA so often that we could probably draw a detailed architectural blueprint of the store from memory. We were able to quickly locate the three items we wanted: sleeper couch, kitchen island, kitchen stools, and masterfully found the corresponding boxes in the warehouse... after which, we followed the usual steps:

STEP ONE: Load everything into the car

STEP TWO: Spend 2 hours trying to put together an item that should theoretically take 15 min.to assemble

PROBLEM: Everything was going according to plan, but as Murphy's Law states: "If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something."

Once Mike fully assembled the couch, we realized it was factory defective. Mike had the exact same couch in college - so he recognized the issue right away... the factory had sewn the cushions on inside out. What are the odds that we picked probably the only defective box in the warehouse? Mike then spent the next 30 min on hold for customer service to report the problem.

STEP THREE: Listen to non-soothing elevator music while trying to reach customer service

After a recent trip to the shore, Mike and I somehow managed to reload the couch (fully assembled) back into his car, and he and Rob returned it. Of course, IKEA doesn't currently have the couch in stock - so we are non-anxiously awaiting a new shipment so that we can repeat this entire process again (minus the defect of course).

Any other friend would have given up on me and my unfathomable bad luck by now - thank goodness Mike isn't like any other friend.