I'm NOT going back to Ikea

Shopping is not my thing. I dread it more than the plague. I only go when the situation deems me necessary to but not without a heavy heart, or should I say, heavy legs. I mean it both literally and figuratively because too much standing gives my varicose-veined legs excruciating pain. Simply put, shopping for me is nothing but a pain in the... legs.

Goodness, I'm so politically correct.

We had to go furniture shopping yesterday. Our new flat has nothing in it, not even a single chair and we plan to move next month already. Ikea seemed to be the perfect solution to this. It was our first time to shop there. We thought all we had to do was --choose a bed, a dining set, part ways with hard-earned cash, and give our address to the delivery men to find it like a breeze-- just like that. We were in for a surprise.

A: Sweetie, they said we need to go down to their sort of like a warehouse to find the furnitures we are buying.
Me: Whaaat! Are they out of their minds?
A: No kidding. They gave us the rows and racks where we can find each piece.
Me: You mean we are going to carry the darn bed and dining set all by ourselves? Don't they have people to do it for us?
A: Apparently not. We have to load them on a cart and take them to the cashier, then we will arrange for the delivery.

Rows and racks like these are where you will have to find the parts of furnitures you're buying. I say parts because yes, that's right, you will be the (un)fortunate one to assemble them later.

Heaven help me, this never entered my mind. Maybe I'm stuck to the third world way of shopping where you can be a self-proclaimed queen when you have enough cash to feed the store's register. Such is not the case here. I learned it the hard way by pushing kilos of wood and steel around Ikea. At least I was only tasked to push parts of four chairs. A had to lift hundreds of kilos of bed and table parts which, unfortunately enough, weigh 50 kilos each. Puffed was the word to describe him at those moments.

"The load we had to carry." Assembling them later would be the greatest challenge of a lifetime.

Puffed and pissed were the perfect adjectives for me. This is the so called first world. Things should be first class. It's ironic how the service isn't so. I'm not just talking about Ikea though it was the last straw. From restaurants to grocery stores, service isn't on the A-list. Or maybe I'm just really a stuck-up third world shopper. Whatever, there remains a fact that I'm not going back to Ikea when I want to buy something that requires heavy lifting.