Barnabas Monkeypants

When Kristen started her current job, the office manager/human resources person was, while a great person, not terribly organized. So when Kristen filled out her I-9 form and asked to have an extra $50 set aside for our Federal taxes (we had had to pay a little the last couple of years and this was before Henry was on the scene), it instead went to the State. Her error meant that we had a nice return in this year’s State taxes, which meant that finally we could get that new bed that we had been clamoring for the past few years.

You see, in the morning, as Henry wakes up, all smiles (and recently all groans), we like to pull him into bed with us so we can all lay around and smile and squirm and chat (his new favorite thing to do). With the old bed, Henry would sink into a deep pillow-top valley, never to be seen again. A new bed, we hoped, would allow him to actually have the ability to move around.

So with Illinois refund in hand, Kristen, Henry, and I headed of to Ikea Saturday morning.

(Funny thing about the drive. You know those green signs you see on the highway that show upcoming exits? It’s either a city or a street or a neighborhood. Well, as we are on I-55, about 15 miles outside of the city, there was a sign for I-355, and underneath it wasn’t any of those things. It just said: Suburbs. What the!? We are in the suburbs! Was this a road to nowhere? Some bizarre circuitous route to hell? It got very cold when we passed that sign, I’ll tell you what.)

Anyway, we get to Ikea. I’m not the biggest fan of this place. For the most part, the furniture is cheap and not great quality, but we tested out the mattress and it seemed pretty good and they had a bed frame that was fetching. Now Ikea is, for the most part, self service, where you have to grab all of the different pieces and boxes yourself, but with big pieces, like beds, they have employees there at the ready to help you make your long and complicated list and to bring everything to you after you pay. Also, we had to have everything delivered, another step in this process, meaning that after paying for the bed frame and mattress, we had to walk over to where they brought the stuff out, see that, yes, those were the items we paid for, and then have another person arrange them to be delivered to our house.

Are you still following? There will be a quiz.

So we bought the bed and frame and we scheduled the delivery (between 4:00 and 8:00 PM on Monday) and headed on back home where I proceeded to get incredibly sick with the stomach flu; just as I was recovering from the bronchitis that knocked me out for a month, this takes me down. (It was so bad that I was out of bed for all of about 2 hours on Sunday.)

By Monday, I was healed enough to go to work (I had deadlines that had to be met), and ready to get home that night to put the bed together (because, it being from Ikea, you have to put everything together yourself). Well, a few things went wrong. First, that 4-8 window? Well, the delivery van arrived at 11:30 in the morning. Silvia, super-nanny, was here to accept it, but it was annoying nonetheless. Second, a key piece of the bed — that being the sideboards — was not delivered. Why not, you ask? Well, because we never bought them. Yes, friends, you actually have to buy them separately. But the clown (I call him that lovingly) that helped us with our order never told us that we needed to buy it.

Wouldn’t you think that an Ikea employee, working in the bedroom department, would know to place such an item in our order (well, the customer service representative who Kristen spoke with on Monday certainly didn’t think so)? All was not lost, we thought, as we still had our old, generic bed frame that we could put the new boxsprings and mattress in and just head back to Ikea in a few days to pick up the missed pieces. That would’ve worked IF THEY FIT. But Ikea being a Swedish company, everything is in damnable metric, and no matter how much I pushed an shoved (and boy did I push and shove) they wouldn’t fit.

Disgusted, frustrated, and angry, I grabbed the car keys and drove back to the store that we shall not mention ever again. (And, in case you were wondering, yes, it is in the suburbs.)

I got back at 8:30, exhausted (remember, just 36 hours earlier I was kneeling in front of the toilet making horrible animal noises) and still angry, and proceeded to put the bed together.

We like the bed. It’s comfortable. The frame puts the mattress a little high off the floor, but we’ll get used to it. This morning, Henry woke up at his usual ungodly hour and, rolling around, he said he liked it too (no more sinking into the plushy valley). But we won’t forget all the hoops we had to go through to get the damned thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Barnabas, Kristen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.