Imagine, if you will, that you’ve just come home from you favorite swedish, self assembly, furniture megastore. You bring the carton inside, (as well as some coasters, a few pillows and 100 pack of tea light candles) and open it up. You start assembling, your wife watching adoringly as you masterfully work you way around the new piece of furniture without needing to swap any parts around. You come to the legs (or other vital component) and find one is missing.
You re-read the instructions to find that it’s not a mistake. It’s been left out on purpose. Instead there’s a note saying that the leg will be “delivered over the next 12 months in small parts that you will have to assemble without further instruction Lycka till och njut*”
You’re annoyed. You were expecting to use the bookcase/table/Selje Bedside Table straight away. You went through all the effort to find it. Drove across town to get it, even said no to a few nights out to afford it and now – it’s pretty much useless. Sure it looks lovely, until you try and do ANYTHING WITH IT…. LIKE SLEEP FOR MORE THAN 40 MINUTES AT A TIME!! (oops – slipped out of my clever analogy for a second there).
You ring up and complain but the Swedish furniture megastore is smarter than you. As you leave the store dizzy with excitement about you knew purchase, thinking about the time you’ll have to play with it, sit quietly adoring it, they ask you to tick a little box at the bottom of the receipt confirming that you’re happy to give up any rights to a refund, especially in the case of “partially complete, broken or defective products”
You ring up the support desk, desperate for help. The person on the end of the phone is lovely but has nothing to say that can actually help. “Have you tried using other things to use as a leg until the new pieces arrive?” or “It’s quite normal to have to wait for some parts to turn up later on” or the frustrating “Lot’s of parents people have been in a similar situation to you, don’t worry, in 12 months ors so all the pieces would have arrived and you look back on this and laugh”
You deflate. Your once adoring wife has changed into clothes more appropriate for sitting on a couch, waiting for the parts to arrive. She’s also over answering the front door 6-8 times per day hoping that it’s the part being delivered to only find out that it’s different parts that we never even knew we were missing.
You look at each other and wonder what the hell you’ve just done when out of the corner of your eye you spot the Billy book case you bought 2.5 years ago on the other side of the room. The one that started as a single set of shelves and now covers most of the wall. That has drawers and cupboard doors with soft-close latches and you know at that moment, at that one split second… that this won’t be the last thing you buy from ikea.
So – if IKEA made babies would you have tried to take your’s back? Was your’s broken or did all the parts arrive on time?
Sharing with Jess over at EssentiallyJess.com for I Blog on Tuesday
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