Eucalyptus Country « Screw-up Tuesday Strikes Again!

Screw-up Tuesday Strikes Again!

Ikea and I have a bit of a love/hate relationship. I love looking at their products in the catalogue and imagining what would work well in this house. I must love Ikea because despite my deep desire to thrash the brains out of whoever invented flat pack, I keep going back. Our bookshelves are all from there, as is the coat rack, shoe rack, towel racks….well you get the picture. Most of our furniture is from both our parents’ places or stuff we bought before we moved in together. Consequently, our interior decorating is a bit mish mash at best. The great thing about Ikea though is that they have reasonably priced stuff in so many different finishes that it doesn’t matter what room I want to put furniture in, they will have something that will tie in reasonably well.

So there is the love….coupled with the hate. The intense hate of arriving at Ikea at 9:45am and forgetting that while they are happy to let you in the building, you can’t cross into the actual bit you came to shop in until the announcement comes over at promptly 10am. Then there is the number of parents who bring their kids there as some kind of fun outing for the day, so you have little kids who have no business walking on their own two feet trying to push a trolley and ramming it into the back of your ankles every five seconds. To top it off, no one seems to be moving faster than that of a very slow tortoise. Very few people even look at the catalogue in detail, it seems they just meander through hoping they’ll see something they like. I find my item, note its location in the self serve area and make a bolt for the exit. By this time, I generally start to mistakenly think the pain is over, as I descend down the stairs, only to find myself stuck in a new throng of dawdlers oohing and aaahing over some hideous plastic sculpture like it is the David or perhaps Venus De Milo! Finally, I see the self serve area in sight, I grab my trolley, find what it was I went there for in the first place and beat it post haste to the checkout. I pay for my goods with a smile that is far too enthusiastic and say a silent prayer to whoever might be listening, thank Yoda that is over for another trip.

Well usually that is the end of it…..I put it in my car, I take it home and I scratch my head over their next to useless graphic instructions that are provided in each and every box. This time….it all went horribly pear-shaped and for that, I blame crows. Yes you read me right, crows. For some reason, casa Stormy (that’s me BTW in case you didn’t already know) has become a popular hang out with some 25 odd crows. Most of the time, I don’t really care. The few we usually have in residence eat the lawn grubs and drive away the noisy Indian Myna birds that would have inundated us by now. We generally co-exist quite peacefully. Now I’m not sure exactly what disturbed me first but at 3am, all I could hear was the “ark ark ark” constantly. Peeked out the window and there is a whole jolly mob of them out there having a damn Country Crows Association meeting on my front lawn and in the neighbour’s tree. At 3AM!!!! Why are birds doing even awake at that hour??

Of course, the light started peeping over the horizon around 4am and with it started the whistles of the Willy Wagtails. Ordinarily I love the little chirps but not when they set of a chain reaction of every kind of birdlife within cooee of my house. Including the peachfaces which reside within this house. By close to 5am, I just couldn’t stand it anymore and I ended up giving up and just having a shower, getting dressed and tried to pretend it was a less ungodly hour. I started flipping through the Ikea catalogue….which is when I got the brilliant idea that I really did need a new desk for my study.

I think this is getting just a bit too long winded now, so I will surmise why my trip to Ikea ended up a complete Screw-up Tuesday:

Forgot they opened at 10am and succumbed to the lure of fresh vanilla danish for breakfast (actually by then it was more like lunch, given when I actually had breakfast)
Found my desk I was after but then got to the self serve area and they appeared to be out of stock. After a round trip back to the Ikea @ Work area, I found that they were inconveniently stored elsewhere but they had stock after all.
Banged the crap out of my shin bones trying to get the damn trolley to stay still while I put my very heavy flatpack desk and drawer combination on it.
Heaved it all into the car, spent 15 minutes driving down the freeway like an old granny because I had to have my drivers seat racked so far forward I could only just move my feet to operate the pedals.
Lugged the whole lot into the back room by myself (given the cats are useless at any kind of manual labour) and started ripping the flat pack desk apart.
Quickly found out that you can put a flat pack desk together with a wrench for a hammer and a butter knife as a screwdriver. It can be done!
Mojo kindly alerted me to the presence of a screwdriver after I’d put the desk together with a butter knife by knocking it off the kitchen counter along with everything else that was placed up there (why oh why didn’t he do that much earlier!)
Opened the box of drawers to assemble to find that there were two conflicting stickers on the box – and I lost out by getting the hideously ugly fluoro yellow filing cabinet/drawer set. Berk! Back to Ikea it goes.
Finally get the exchange, get back home again to find that my intelligence has been utterly sapped after 14 odd hours of wakefulness and only 3hrs sleep the night before. I spent ages swearing and kicking various bits of metal and cursing why I’d decided to go to Ikea in the first place, only to discover I had read the instructions back to front and was trying to assemble the unit back to front.

Having said that, I have a rocking new desk that I put together myself, largely using tools designed for other things entirely. But OMG, how chuffed was I to see that it didn’t fall apart the instant both cats jumped on it to give it their seal of approval. BONZA!!