IKEA

is

evil.

For those of you who know me, this post is going to be very contradicting to read, simply because ever since IKEA landed in Dubai years ago (back in Deira City Centre) I was completely in love with the store. No trip to City Centre was complete without a visit to IKEA and hauling home something that I really didn't need.

Take this weekend for example. I needed to get a decent shoe rack for our new place, and I was going to be near Festival City anyway, so I decided to pop into IKEA and pick up one if they had what I was looking for. Now I personally think that the person who designed the IKEA stores was also responsible for designing the set of the Crystal Maze. Suppose you want to head over to the bedroom section to look at sheets - you have to walk through the whole fucking store before you get to where you need to be. So naturally, my shoe rack was held in the "No one can find this place without GPS" area. Trudging through the living rooms, kitchen, bathroom, work area, and bedrooms, I finally end up in the correct section and spot a decent enough shoe cabinet that will house about 16 pairs of shoes. Great - now to pick it up. This is of course where the evil humor really kicks in. Since IKEA simply love 'flat packing' everything from a bed down to a laundry basket, the shoe rack isn't actually available for pick up until I go to the ground floor warehouse and locate it on the correct aisle. So I scribble down the location and press on through the rest of the store. By the way, if you tend to notice 'shortcuts' to other sections of the store, don't take them - they just fool you into walking around another section all over again. By this point I'm halfway through the store, dehydrated and slowly losing the will, to live. Luckily the Swedish geniuses thought of this as well, and figured that it would be a great idea to put a restaurant in the middle of the store, where you can pay 25 bucks for microwaved salmon.

I finally manage to navigate my way to the warehouse through the swarms of people lugging their bright yellow plastic bags filled to the brim with glassware, candles, sticks, and other delightful finds. I accelerate towards aisle 24B where my shoe cabinet is kept, and slide the seemingly 2-ton box onto my trolley. An hour later, I'm dragging the box into my living room and tear into it with all the excitement of a kid getting an Xbox at Christmas. But my joy is short-lived, as all I find in the box are 20 planks of wood, a pictorial instruction sheet that requires several gigahertz of processing power to understand, and a packet of screws and wooden pegs that is supposedly sufficient enough to hold this behemoth of a show rack together.

Forty five minutes later, I've given up. The wonderful staff at the store failed to mention that this particular cabinet needs to be nailed to the wall, a feat which my gay genes just cannot comprehend the logistics of. So at this very moment there's a coffin-sized half-built shoe cabinet in the middle of my living room, while my shoes have found a new home in an empty Masafi carton by the door.

My humor with IKEA doesn't end there - I love how everything is branded "IKEA of Sweden". Sweden my ass - the label should read "Designed by IKEA of Sweden. Manufactured by J J Prakash & Sons LLC" And what the hell is up with the names of some of their products? There's a BINTJE storage box, a STRIND table, INDIRA bedspread, a MOKERN shower curtain, a EKTORP PIXBO sofa, and a YNGSJÖ tealight holder.

YNGSJÖ?

Are you FAKHNG kidding me?

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You are reading this post on a blog is no longer maintained - please visit www.outinmyhead.com instead!