Hey, Swedish Pricks! I hate you and your stupid meatballs.

I went to IKEA on Wednesday (against my will, my girlfriend forced me into it) because I needed a floating shelf or a small floor-based shelf for my room. It is a tiny, tiny room; having extra space is crucial. Until Wednesday, the furniture in my bedroom consisted of an IKEA Expedit 2×4 bookcase (re-appropriated as a record shelf!), and a bed. And it felt cramped. Can you fucking believe it? I decided that having the record shelf on its side was taking up too much room, so I stood it up against the wall. Unfortunately, this left me with no place to put my turntable. Shit! I guess I needed to buy a shelf for it.

To IKEA I went, to fetch a shelf. Only, your stores don’t think about depth when building shelves, so everything is really narrow and could not support something the size of a turntable. It’d be nice for some paperback books, but who the hell wants to put a shelf with books in their bedroom? That’s what bookcases are for! I can’t fit a nice, expensive turntable on a shelf with a width of only 11 inches. It won’t fit. I need the depth, man.

Then guess what happened? I found something that worked: An Expedit (like the one I already have) that is only 32″ x 32″! The depth of the top is the same as my huge record shelf, 15 3/8 inches! Perfect! I hurriedly wrote down the details so I could find it in that labyrinth warehouse at the bottom of every IKEA, and made my way through the rest of the stupid maze you have to walk through to get to the end of the IKEA.

I grabbed the Expedit, and only then did I notice that it was white. I wanted a black-brown shelf, not a white shelf! That would look totally stupid next to a bigger version of the same shelf that was black-brown in color. If they were the same color, it would look so much more normal. So, I kindly asked an IKEA employee where the black-brown model was.

“It doesn’t come in black, just white,” I was told.

Fuck me with a chainsaw! You made the perfect piece of furniture and chose it to be the only item in your store that doesn’t come in all three of your three main color choices? What a load of retarded bullshit! I left IKEA feeling very dissatisfied. I ate dinner at Chevy’s and then went home. Chevy’s was alright, I guess. It smelled like a truckload of Mexicans in there.

“The very next day…” (to quote Nina Nastasia) I went to Target, Home Depot, Staples, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Nobody had shelves like IKEA. I went home and called my mom and told her my room was a mess and I didn’t have space to fit even the most basic necessities, like a lamp. She said to check IKEA’s website, and maybe they just didn’t have what I wanted at that location. I told mom she was a moron, and then chewed her about how she sent me a text message the other day from inside a movie theater. Can you believe that? How fucking rude of her! I was offended on behalf of all the other people in the theater. What a bitch! As I chastised her, I silently clicked through the IKEA website, because her idea was actually pretty smart. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it first.

Holy shit, I found out that IKEA makes the 32″ x 32″ Expedit shelf in black-brown! I quickly went through the process of placing an order online. The process was further expedited (pun intended) by the fact that I somehow went from typing in my shipping address to receiving an order confirmation.

“That’s odd,” I thought. “They didn’t even ask for a billing address or credit card information.” I decided to hang up on mom mid-sentence and call IKEA to see what the fuck their problem was.

By the way, I don’t know when exactly I shifted from talking to you IKEA to they IKEA, but I hope my words still have the same impact.

I got on the phone with Kathy (or maybe it was Cathy?), a really slutty sounding cooze who really helped me and was pleasant to talk to. She said there was a problem with the IKEA website and no orders were being processed. She offered to take my order, right there on the phone! I said okay and told her the unit that I wanted. After I told her I wanted to jam my unit in her fitting, I asked for the Expedit in black-brown. She said, “Congratulations, fuckstick, we’ve got one! Oh, by the way, it’s a bit heavy so we’re going to charge you $120 dollars for delivery.” I hung up on the bitch and called back hoping to speak to somebody else.

The next woman I spoke to informed me that the IKEA in Burbank — where I just was yesterday — had received a shipment of Expedit 32″ x 32″ shelves the night before. After I told her I was just there yesterday, she said, “I’m telling you, man, they got them after you left.” So, I asked for their phone number in the hopes that I could have one put on hold for me.

“That IKEA location does not have a phone number for incoming calls,” the vagina with legs, arms, eyes and a mouth told me. She said, “I guess you’ll just have to go there and get one.”

So, for the second day in a row, during rush hour traffic again, I went to IKEA. I raced to the back and saw exactly where the shelf should have been, but there was nothing there. I went an asked an employee where they were, and she responded by saying, “We don’t have any.”

“Listen bitch,” I began. “I just got off the phone with a woman who said you received a shipment last night. I even went online and checked your inventory, and it said you had them. Stop standing there with your fist up your ass, and go ask somebody who knows or look it up in your computer.”

I didn’t actually say that. And, by the way, isn’t it a tad bit interesting that every moron I’ve dealt with to this point in the story is a woman? Yes, how interesting…

The girl began type-type-typing away at her computer terminal and, lo-and-behold, saw that they did receive a shipment of Expedits last night! She went to show me where they were, and then she looked up and said, “Oh, they haven’t been stocked yet.”

I looked up about twenty feet and saw a large number of boxes sitting on a shelf. Those were them! Those were the Expedits. I asked her to get one down, and she said she couldn’t. I said, “What do you mean?” and she said, “We can’t bring the forklift in until after hours. You can stay here until we close at 9:30, or…” and I said, “You’re kidding, right? I’m going to sit here eating meatballs for the next four hours? No, thanks. How about you just run your little butt up a ladder and grab me one of them shelves, okay?” She said, “You can stay after we close–” and I cut her off by saying, “Look, I don’t want to play hide the penis in the vagina with you after hours, I just want my goddamned Expedit!” She said to come back tomorrow. I said, “How will I know they’re in stock?”

She grabbed a piece of scrap paper and wrote down a phone number and extension on it. It was for the loading manager, or something. His name was Milton. I didn’t really care what he did or what his name was, I was just livid that she gave me a phone number for the IKEA in Burbank when not an hour earlier I’d been told that IKEA didn’t have a phone number.

That was when I first had the idea to write this letter.

I called the number today from work and asked what’s-his-face if they’d stocked the bin with Expedits today. He said yes. I said how many were there, and he responded with “eight”. I asked if they’d still be there this evening, and he said, “Maybe.”

So, I left work early and raced to IKEA, again facing rush hour traffic. Three days in a row of IKEA driving through traffic. I wanted to die. When I arrived I raced into the warehouse, grabbed the stupid Expedit and got in line. Then IKEA decided to slow me down by changing-out cash registers right before I was to check out. Then I noticed the box I was holding was damaged, and so too was the wood inside. I had to go all the way back to the bin and get another box, wait on another line to pay, and then I ate two terrible hotdogs and washed it down with a warm cup of soda. It tasted like epic failure. And the ketchup was my own sense of remorse for allowing myself to be raped repeatedly by IKEA.

I got my stupid Expedit. I don’t even care anymore. I put it together and scratched up one of the sides in the process. I’ve since made that the bottom, and finished rearranging my room.

This has been one of the worst weeks I’ve had in years. I blame IKEA. What say you in response, crappy Swedish furniture peddlers?

Sincerely Yours,
Evan LeVine
“blogger”

Oscar Peterson Trio – Easy Does It
Reigns – Everything Beyond These Walls Has Been Razed
Vetiver – Everyday
Leonard Cohen – Sisters Of Mercy

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