Ikea: Swedish for "Purgatory"

Sunday arrived bright and on time, and I got the smart idea to go to Ikea to purchase an entertainment unit for my living room. (If you don't have an Ikea near where you live, it's a furniture store, rougly the size of your average Death Star, that traffics in inexpensive furniture that's held together mostly by particle board, allen-head screws, and the power of prayer.) With some quick measurements of the space around our TV we hopped in the Toyota and rolled out to Emeryville.

As we entered the building we had to run a gauntlet of shoppers leaving, all of whom had the same shell-shocked, dead-eyed looks on their faces as concentration camp survivors. We boarded an escalator and looked down to see a plexiglassed kid zoo. I guess you're supposed to leave your kids there while you shop, but it looked to me more like grist for some child's future therapy sessions.

Shell of a man: "You mean, the reason I cry everytime I orgasm is my mom left me in the Ikea for Kids play area?"

Therapist: "You've just made a huge breakthrough. That'll be 300 space dollars."

Space dollars. Because it's the future. Get it?

Where was I? Oh yeah, hell on earth...

So they made us walk a couple of furlongs through the store before we found the department we were looking for. After an hour of brow-furrowing and consultations with my measurements (which it turns out I wrote in a burst of automatic writing, using an antiquated dialect of Sanskrit that I don't actually read), I realized they didn't have one piece of furniture that fit around my TV. Apparantly I'm the first man on Earth to own a 51" Sony television. While that filled me with pride, pride won't hold a DVD/VCR combo deck and a cable box. So it was on to Plan B: shelving.

Rachel found some shelves we both liked, and saw that they also had upright pillar shelves in a strangely similar style. In a MacGyver moment, we decided we could buy two pillars and a shelf and put the shelf on top of the pillars, and bada-bing, that's entertainment (unit). We copied down the product numbers as well as the aisle and bin numbers, which perplexed us a bit. Our paper looked like the phone number for an office extension in Tehran.

We were directed by the staff to go downstairs (closer towards Inferno) to the "Self-Serve Area". We finagled a handtruck and headed towards the first product on our list, which of course wasn't in the veneer we wanted. Then there's some confusion. Why are the side pillars in the same bin as the shelf, and they're all have the same icon on the box? Which part is which? What madness is this? I spent an interminable amount of time standing around by our carts while Rachel ran upstairs to look at the shelf.

When she got back, my suspicion was born out: they were the same damn piece. They mounted one horizontally on a wall and gave it a different product code. I felt my last few points of Sanity evaporate away and hefted up a third "side pillar" (sigh).

Soon we maneuvered our 200 pounds of wood through the lolly-gagging crowd (To all the slow people in front of us who pretended we and our huge cargo didn't exist: By Zeus, I will make orphans of your children, so swear I) to the checkout lines. The best part of the trip was that the lines weren't nearly as bad as I'd heard they could be. So they've got that going for them.

Some helpful tips for the prospective Ikea shopper:

1. Let your family know you're going so arrangements can be made if you snap and take hostages.

2. If you see a vision of a temptress standing in front of a fire door, beckoning you to freedom, that's just Satan fucking with you. There are no easy exits in life or Ikea.

3. Do not go with a hangover. Do go drunk, though.

4. You won't find what you want on your first trip. Don't count on finding it on the second either. Fortunately for you, Emeryville has many low-priced inns and residence hotels nearby so you can continue attacking it without wasting gas.

5. Rent a semi. Seriously, these boxes are huge. We buried my grandfather in a smaller box (also purchased at Ikea).

6. The numbers on the tags don't mean anything. They're a code to weed out the dull and witless among us. Every box downstairs contains the same volume of particle board and allen-head screws - only the directions change.