I snapped awake, sat up in bed, wore the expression of someone who just discovered that what they thought was a fart was a bit juicier than that. But my wife will not be denied, and so we got in the car and headed to our nearest hideous blue store of doom.
Ikea is weird. I have nightmares about the place being completely empty (fat chance!) and wandering those maze-like showrooms to try and find my way out, only to find that the place cycles back on itself, and you can never escape.
We managed to park OK (which is quite an achievement when it's busy) and made our way into the store. The initial introduction to the place was chaotic. Kids were running everywhere, adults often listlessly shouting "Don't do that Logan!" while endlessly scrolling on their phones. So we entered the conveyor belt, my wife, my daughter and I - the human conveyor belt where you must not dawdle, you must not pause, lest you have some fat twonk practically entering you from behind in their urgent need to get past you. If you want an analogy for "The Human Race" this is it.
Halfway round the store after we'd started to pick up stuff for my daughter's Uni room, we encountered the cafe. Ikea cafes are like nothing you've ever seen or will ever see elsewhere. It was RAMMED with people. If you took a 100ft by 100ft box, and crammed as many human bodies into it as you could get away with under the Geneva Convention, that would be what the cafe looked like, times 100.
We skipped the cafe. We would go hungry instead.
Continuing around, there were moments where the store felt empty. It was weird, like the movie "Backrooms" - Like nefarious creatures had sprung out of the walls and devoured the shoppers. But then it would fill up again, and you'd end up again with someone cramming a shopping trolley up your ass while you relaxed for a moment to look at some naff piece of plastic that would somehow improve your life exponentially.
By the end we were about ready to drop. We somehow managed to cram all our purchases into a series of mismatched bags, and hobbled our way back to the car. At this point my daughter had the bright idea that we should go back to the smaller cafe at the front of the store to eat some swedish garbage. Weirdly this was the high point. Proper plant-based hot dogs and meatballs were consumed, along with some bizarre car-shaped sweets and some coconut-covered oat and chocolate balls.
I survived Ikea but I now fear the next time my wife gently nibbles on my eyebrows on a sunday morning, and whispers those fateful words again...
Comments
Post a Comment