The Nightmare Chair

In anticipation of a small gathering held recently at our new flat, Michelle and I decided to add one relatively nice chair to the living room inventory, so that the adults in attendance would not have to sit on the floor.

It goes without saying that when a certain age is reached – and many if not most of my friends are that age – sitting on a floor can be a one-way journey, one which does not come with a guarantee that the traveler can get back up.

We had chosen a chair and footstool from IKEA, and imagined a simple and straightforward trip. Instead it turned into an ordeal, a test of stamina and grit.

If I had been riding a snowboard, whooshing down an icy hill while balancing a hungry bear on my shoulders, in the dark blinded by sleet, approaching a cliff and being shot at by Daleks, it could not have been worse.

With any luck, it will be the last time for a while that we’ll be visiting the blue and yellow box store where, like Ft Knox, the nation’s supply of Swedish meatballs is stored.

If you had carefully measured the living room’s dimensions like I had, you knew that a chair with a small footprint was all that would fit. That was a good thing, since we don’t have one of those obscenely big SUV’s. I fully understand the paradox presented by the fact that one would have been handy in this case, but we all know that most of the time, these beastly behemoths carry a cargo consisting of nothing more than the driver. My own sensible sedan, an Audi, is currently under the weather, so the vehicle at our disposal for the task was my wife’s Honda Accord Coupe. This is an excellent and eminently reliable conveyance, but it is not made for carrying living room furniture.

Still, armed with our considerable experience with the assemble-it-yourself mantra of IKEA, we felt confident that the small, flat box it was certain to come it would fit in the car when the seats were folded just so. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha.

The evening of the caper, we trusted our instincts and sped through the labyrinth of the store, ignoring the ubiquitous containers of handy crap begging to be bought. Soon we were face to face with the chair, a Björnibumme. (Most if not all the products are given unpronounceable Swedish names.) Legend has it that the chair was originally designed for an average, cross-country-ski-loving Swede with a tiny butt, measuring precisely one SSBW (Standard Swedish Butt Width). However, to better fit the American market, the chair’s butt width had to be expanded. This reporter will not reveal his own personal butt width, although Google probably knows it already.

We examined the chair, and determined that the box which the chair must come in would fit into the car. So we jotted down the sector, region, quadrant, aisle, shelf, zone and area numbers from the handy tag, as well as the product code, the color code, the description code, the country code, the demarcation code, the pricing code, the taxation code and the desperation code, and made our way to the pick-up area. There, using GPS technology, a bloodhound, a bat and a divining rod, we located the chair AND the accompanying footstool. We were in shopper heaven.

The chair was hiding inside a large box; not the flat accommodation we expected. Was the chair really in there? Was it actually in parts that would more easily fit into our car? Was it in fact the body of Harriet Vanger? Rather than waste time trying to find an IKEA employee to open the box, I whipped out my tool – relax, it was a Swiss Army Knife – and opened the box. Long ago I adopted the ethical stance that usually it’s more expedient to ask for forgiveness than permission. Instead of flattish parts, the chair was wrapped in an impressively voluminous cocoon of paper. It was time to get help.

I found a helpful young man who told me that the legs of that particular chair were indeed detached, and in a plastic bag inside the box. But he also said that the rest of the chair was already assembled into one large thing. Hmm.

Michelle and I studied the amorphous shape heavily wrapped in paper, and calculated that it would fit into the car. With the young man supplying most of the horsepower, Team Douglass loaded the chair and footstool onto our cart, and we headed towards the cashier.

The cashier section of IKEA is much like the Fire Swamp in “The Princess Bride”. To safely navigate it (nearly inconceivable) means you have to pass the equivalents of exploding fireballs coming out of the ground; rodents of unusual size; and lightning sand, or “snow sand” as it’s called in the book. When you exit you feel like you’ve really accomplished something.

Michelle stayed by the cart at the loading zone, while I braved the rain as I walked the thousand yards back to the car. Once the car was in the official loading position, we unwrapped the chair from the paper, and our hearts sank; it looked too big. But we were troopers, and tried turning it this way and that way, moving car seats and folding down interior sections, and having zero luck. I squinted into the middle distance, and saw what appeared to be an IKEA employee. Using a Blästeflär, an emergency flare I saw in a bin next to the Swedish meatballs, I flagged him down.

Julio sized up the situation, grabbed the chair like a toy, and then wrestled it into every position we had already tried. It wouldn’t go into the car. Finally, in heavily accented English, he said that we should “purchaso uno tarpo mucho grande.” I had no idea what this meant. He pointed to a door, and used International Gesture Association hand signs suggesting I go in. There I explained my predicament, and the fellow said, “Oh! Julio was saying that you need a tarp, which you can buy for $5. He must have meant that then you could transport the chair on top of the car.”

Great.

So I bought a tarp, and brought it back to the loading zone. There, Julio seized the chair, which was already protected to some degree by a plastic covering, and in moments he had used the tarp to encapsulate the chair like a cupcake with a New York Times. It looked perfectly shielded and protected, and I applauded his diligence. Now the chair needed to be protected from me.

IKEA supplies limitless string for tying down purchases, and I must have used several miles. To my credit, I engineered a combination of techniques, taking the best from sailing and Christmas present wrapping, along with some Uruguayan basket weaving blended with spider web management, and after a while the chair was secured to the top of Michelle’s Honda. We took off into the night.

The Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his epic 1830 novel with the trenchant line, “It was a dark and stormy night…” Bulwer-Lytton was not with us that night, but if he were, he would have agreed that the night was indeed dark and stormy. And as I mentioned before, rainy. It was awful, not the kind of driving conditions one wants when transporting a large, non-aerodynamic object tied to the top of a car. No way was I going to drive as fast as the speed limit; prudence lifted my foot from the accelerator, and we slowed down to the same velocity that a pregnant sheep can waddle. Lots of friends honked their approval behind us.

At one point, Michelle shrieked, my stomach vaulted, and I pulled over. She could see through the sunroof that the chair had shifted. This was not good. We did not wish to litter the highway with a living room chair. I got out of the car and, avoiding the cars and trucks that roared by several inches away, I examined the load. It had indeed shifted, the result of a poor tying job made worse by physics. I tried to tighten the cords and move the chair back into a more secure location. Somewhat satisfied, we took off.

Soon after that Michelle heard something, and was worried that maybe we had a flat tire. We’ve all had flat tires, and the feel is unmistakable. Her Honda is, of course, front-wheel drive, and so I thought the feel would be even more pronounced, but it didn’t strike me as a flat. In addition, I couldn’t hear that troublesome sound. Just to be sure, I pulled over anyway for a look. As Bulwer-Lytton noted previously, it was very dark and raining, and even with my little utility flashlight I couldn’t get a good look at the tires. So I dodged a few more cars and trucks, and got back in. At that point I had to take a minute to wipe my glasses and hands, since it had been coming down in buckets. I was pretty damn scared, and even though I’ve faced my fair share of danger – heck, quite a bit more than my fair share – my pulse was racing. I just wanted to get us home safe and put the damned chair in the living room.

My grip on the steering wheel tightened, my blood pressure went up up up, and I went from Nervous Wreck Class 4 to Nervous Wreck Class 5, the highest one. The rain made it hard to see; there was a surprising amount of traffic, and not only were the other cars, trucks and monster SUV’s going too fast, they were also too close to the vehicles in front of them; and thumping away at the back of my mind was the possibility that we really did have a flat tire.

Sensing that I was still going too fast, I slowed down even more, generating another chorus of honks behind us. Tough.

We kept on rolling. After an eternity of nerve-wracking driving on I-5, we took our exit, and soon after we were driving through downtown Seattle, the most direct route to our flat in Magnolia. In the reflection from a building’s large glass windows, I could see that the chair was still up there. Bless my soul.

A few minutes later we pulled up our street. Michelle suggested that instead of going into the basement parking lot where the car is kept, it might be better to park the car on the street, since the car with the chair on top might not fit under the automatic garage door. She’s from Boston, and she’s a wicked smaht girl.

We parked on the street, and hurried inside, carrying the other stuff we bought; cleverly, we had forgotten to buy the large bags available, since IKEA – inexplicably – does not supply them. From the junk drawer I grabbed a boxcutter, since my pocket-sized Swiss Army penknife was not up to the task of cutting so much heavy twine. Soon I had freed the chair from its bonds on top of the weary but unbroken Honda, and carried it to the building’s entrance.

There was no elevator to help us get it up three floors, so I chose the moment to develop a long and carefully constructed stream of curses directed at Mother Nature, IKEA, chairs in general, small cars, large SUV’s, diets lacking in fiber, and the Bush Administration. When I came back inside, I was astonished to discover that Michelle must have come back downstairs, found the chair, and carried it up all by herself. She is amazing, and one day I’ll tell you about the time we moved into a flat together in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Minutes later we had a fully functioning chair and footstool, and a fully functioning glass of single malt scotch, and my blood pressure began at last to decline.

But we’re not done yet.

It had taken only a few minutes to assemble the chair, plop it into place, and begin the admiration phase. Only it was too big. You gotta be kidding – we go to all this trouble, and I mean all this trouble, and the bloody chair turned out to be too big for where we wanted it. It looked crowded and wrong, and when your wife is an art history major, you learn that things have to look right.

We were exhausted, and while we agreed we liked the chair – we both got to test drive it – by far the best part of the chair-buying experience was the smoky, peaty 12-year old Bowmore, the reward for getting home alive with the chair.

That next morning, I got up late after sleeping horribly. My shoulders ached from the highly agitated drive home. I had had all sorts of bad dreams about snowboards and hungry bears riding on me piggy-back, and scary Daleks bearing down on me shouting “Exterminate! Exterminate!” By the time I zombied my way out to the kitchen to make some life-giving coffee, Michelle had already left for work. While preparing the brown juice I naturally glanced over into the living room. Holy cow. Was I in the wrong home?

The living room furniture had been completely rearranged. The couch and chairs, the Thai coffee table that looks like it’s running away, the end tables; everything was all herumgekehrt. (I’ve got to use my German now and then or I’ll lose it.) But when I walked in and gave it a closer look, and thought about it, I saw that it was much better. The spatial geometry was improved, it was more conducive to group conversations, and there was lots more space; it worked.

Michelle had made an executive decision, and before leaving for work, had cast a magic spell on the living room furniture.

Later that day, the plan was for me to pick up Michelle after work, and then we were going to do our Friday grocery shopping. About fifteen minutes before she got off work, I headed out the apartment and down to the parking garage. I started the car, backed out, and then headed towards the exit. But something was wrong. In the echo chamber of the basement garage, sounds are amplified, and as I crawled towards the garage door, I could hear the distinctive blart blart blart of a flat tire. I stopped the car and got out, and sure enough, the right front tire was flat. A chill flooded its way through all my warm parts, which are pretty much the only kind of parts I have.

Not only had I white-knuckled my way from IKEA back home in awful conditions, sick with worry about losing the chair or worse, we had made the perilous journey with a flat tire. A flat front tire, the more important of the two kinds of tires. Och.

As for an anticlimax, I took off the offending tire, which had a large broken snow chain link embedded in it, put on the donut spare, and took Michelle grocery shopping. The next day I drove to Les Schwab, where I waited in a long line, but they earned considerable customer loyalty because they repaired the flat for free. At last I went home, sat down comfortably in the new chair, and didn’t care a bit what my butt width was.

A Wall of Cheesecloth

The other day Michelle and I were at the Pike Place Market shopping for dinner stuff. We were going to try a Jamie Oliver fish dish, so we bought some very fresh snapper from one of the fishmongers, and leeks and fennel from a greengrocer. Then we needed some cheesecloth, so we headed to the kitchen supply shop.

I love to cook, and there’s always fun stuff to see there, the high-end pots and pans, gorgeous knives and all sorts of creative kitchen gadgetry — but it’s always crowded. And the aisles are only just wide enough for a Pekingese, one who has been dieting for the Westminster dog show. Doing anything there takes far longer than it should, precisely because the place is good and it’s popular.

(I am reminded of the Yogi Berra-ism, about a place that got so crowded nobody went there anymore.)

Before we reached the kitchen store, we had been steam-rolling our way through the market, finding what we needed and getting things done. And since we had a bus to catch, we were constantly looking at our watches. There was no time to waste, so instead of wandering around the store, getting lost in nooks and crannies and becoming distracted by all the cool stuff, I tackled a clerk like he was Tom Brady and asked where the cheesecloth was. By the time I found the right region, and then located another clerk to help zoom in, he told me that he had just helped someone else find cheesecloth.

“A little blonde?” I asked. He nodded yes, and I knew that Michelle had somehow beaten me to it, and was already taking her prize to the cashier. That’s where we hit the wall.

It was a wall of corporate policy, and this can often be a kind of wall you can’t go over, around or through.

While the little package had the bar code stuff on it, the item did not compute in the store’s cash register inventory system. The clerk asked for help, noting that the SKU number (stock-keeping unit) wasn’t coming up. We waited. But no help was forthcoming. So there we stood, money in hand, and neither the corporate software nor the company policy would let us buy it.

Or rather, the clerk wouldn’t let us buy it. He said it was about four or five dollars, and that was fine with us. Take our money and let’s go. But no such luck.

We had reached one of those situations where an employee, a relatively low-level employee, could not simply decide to enter a retail item as “miscellaneous” and proceed. He had to follow company protocol, which stipulated more or less that “all items have to have a valid SKU and be processed correctly, or the employee will be shot.”

At this point I started to get a little grouchy, and pointed out that now and then there will be things that are not in the system, and that the store has to have a way to deal with them. There has to be a way so that the item can be sold to a customer, and the transaction completed.

Why are retail employees brain-washed to follow this instruction so religiously? Part of it is because managers want reports, to know how things are going. What were the monthly sales from the pots and pans division? Was the big advertising campaign on gourmet knives successful? How did cheesecloth sales compare to last year? Designing product code categories and sub-categories allows managers to answer questions, and the better questions they can ask, the better chance they have to run the business successfully.

But now and then it’s going to happen, a customer is going to bring up something they want to buy, and it won’t have a price or an ID tag on it. (This drives me crazy; if I find something on a shelf with no price, I feel that it ought to be free.) I mean, c’mon! If you place a retail item in play, but don’t take the trouble to slap a price on it, how well are you doing your job? How is the company supposed to make money? And what about the inconvenience to the customer?

What then?

Maybe 99.9% of all items will be properly accounted for, and then along comes a phantom that shouldn’t exist. How much out of whack do you think this will knock the company’s accounting? Virtually zero. So why get all bent out of shape when it happens? What is more important: the happiness of the customer or the accountant?

(I know my answer.)

Allow the clerk, encourage the employee, to make a decision — estimate the price and hit the ‘Misc’ button — and let the customer get out of there. You owe it to the customer, and you build loyalty that way. And then I won’t get grouchy.

Someone eventually did help the clerk with a product code, but we had to wait a long time to pay for a $3.95 item. Jamie Oliver’s fish dish was delicious, but a Seattle retail clerk nearly found himself strained through a cheesecloth.