Friday, January 30, 2004
The Bed
The Story of the Bed Platform Assembly (excerpted from a note to Mom, the Bed Advisor), or The Rough Love of the IKEA-Consumer Relationship:
yes well. Turned out the tools were supposed to have been in the box with the damaged footboard. The manager, a woman mine own age, let me stand there in the middle of customer service and rant and rave and rant and rave until I was done. I felt like hugging her after. I think the only thing at that point I said which had any rational merit to it was that the folks pulling things from the warehouse area needed to have a description of the exact contents of each box so that one can actually tell where the pieces are supposed to be, and the customer can if she likes actually open them up to check each box's contents against said list. But I guess that would be TOO MANY WORDS FOR IKEA, WOULDN'T IT.
I managed to pound two of the wooden pegs into the wrong holes of the footboard, okay, do you know what happens when you pound wooden pegs into particle board?
THEY BECOME ONE WITH EACH OTHER.
So I ripped one out using pliers with sheer force and the other came out in pieces. There I was cursing again the name of all that is unholy and Swedish and reliving the moments in Customer Service when I was standing in front of the spare hardware buckets staring at the wooden pegs and thinking "I should get a few extra of..." lalalalalalalalalala and then your brain gallops off onto another thought, like a gorilla in the mist...
'member how heavy those side panels were? Well to shove them into the headboard and footboard you really have to have two people, to get the wooden pegs matching and aligned on each end. So I found a beautiful use for all those books I don't give away...I propped the leetle fuckers up on either end with Billy Collins and Sylvia Plath so that they were flush with the holes, braced the headboard against the sliding glass door with "Mirrors of Ancient Womanhood" and then stood behind the footboard dorsal side due south like a pack mule and back-kicked the shit out of each side of the footboard until it jammed itself into the sideboard and further on into the head.
Now *that* drawing was definitely not in the IKEA instructions. by the time I finished I was down to camisole and socks, sweating and screaming at everything that did or didn't move the way I told it to. And my left hand is not working right for the seventeen THOUSAND tiny tiny screws I had to tighten into each side of the underframe, FOR NO APPARENT REASON because those you know those weird aluminum braces that Y-ed out like a fan from the main support beam? They don't support fuckall once you get the bed together, so...okay why was I forcing pinhead screws through holes that hadn't been punched large enough to handle them again?
I have spoken.
If anyone needs me, like a Chinese fortune, for everything until further notice I will be IN BED.
The Story of the Bed Platform Assembly (excerpted from a note to Mom, the Bed Advisor), or The Rough Love of the IKEA-Consumer Relationship:
yes well. Turned out the tools were supposed to have been in the box with the damaged footboard. The manager, a woman mine own age, let me stand there in the middle of customer service and rant and rave and rant and rave until I was done. I felt like hugging her after. I think the only thing at that point I said which had any rational merit to it was that the folks pulling things from the warehouse area needed to have a description of the exact contents of each box so that one can actually tell where the pieces are supposed to be, and the customer can if she likes actually open them up to check each box's contents against said list. But I guess that would be TOO MANY WORDS FOR IKEA, WOULDN'T IT.
I managed to pound two of the wooden pegs into the wrong holes of the footboard, okay, do you know what happens when you pound wooden pegs into particle board?
THEY BECOME ONE WITH EACH OTHER.
So I ripped one out using pliers with sheer force and the other came out in pieces. There I was cursing again the name of all that is unholy and Swedish and reliving the moments in Customer Service when I was standing in front of the spare hardware buckets staring at the wooden pegs and thinking "I should get a few extra of..." lalalalalalalalalala and then your brain gallops off onto another thought, like a gorilla in the mist...
'member how heavy those side panels were? Well to shove them into the headboard and footboard you really have to have two people, to get the wooden pegs matching and aligned on each end. So I found a beautiful use for all those books I don't give away...I propped the leetle fuckers up on either end with Billy Collins and Sylvia Plath so that they were flush with the holes, braced the headboard against the sliding glass door with "Mirrors of Ancient Womanhood" and then stood behind the footboard dorsal side due south like a pack mule and back-kicked the shit out of each side of the footboard until it jammed itself into the sideboard and further on into the head.
Now *that* drawing was definitely not in the IKEA instructions. by the time I finished I was down to camisole and socks, sweating and screaming at everything that did or didn't move the way I told it to. And my left hand is not working right for the seventeen THOUSAND tiny tiny screws I had to tighten into each side of the underframe, FOR NO APPARENT REASON because those you know those weird aluminum braces that Y-ed out like a fan from the main support beam? They don't support fuckall once you get the bed together, so...okay why was I forcing pinhead screws through holes that hadn't been punched large enough to handle them again?
I have spoken.
If anyone needs me, like a Chinese fortune, for everything until further notice I will be IN BED.
