New Office Smell

23:18.15 - Sunday 26th September 2004   (Link to This Entry)

My office now smells of wood. For the first time in my life (and certainly the last time, willingly) I went to Ikea to get some blinds for the window. Said window is 250cm wide and 140cm high and, since the installation of double glazing, it snares the heat from the sun and slowly cooks my desk and everything thereon. After much consideration and hunting about for the cheapest nice blinds I could find, it turns out Ikea do some suitable wooden venetian blinds for £50.

So off we went. Our nearest Ikea is a little past Leeds and we managed to arrive on one of the busiest days ever. On entering I realised that we were walking through the set-pieces that you see in the catalogue - different 'rooms' in some fantasy-land house just as you see them in the brochure. All well and good, but there was nothing that you could actually pick up and put into your bright yellow Ikea-branded bag.

One shrewd and incredibly annoying move was to force everyone to walk through the entire store no matter what they wanted to buy. We eventually found the blinds some time after lunch (Yes, it was so slow we stopped for lunch - go figure. Nice canteen though.) but even then we had to endure the constant shuffle-stop-shuffle of a thousand suffering shoppers all heading in the same direction like sheep going to a shearing. And like sheep, after being shorn of our fifty-odd quid, we gambolled gaily to freedom, stopping just once to grab a 65p icecream before fleeing for the meadow collection point.

I guess it serves us right for going on a Saturday, but the whole experience was a huge let-down for me. Thankfully I don't have to take anything back, but if I did... I'd get someone else to do it.