I Hate People... Especially Ikea's Webmaster

Let's face up to it, folks: Ikea sucks.

Yes, they make furniture which is not shitty, and, yes, some, I repeat, *some* of their shit is not ridiculously overpriced for its hi-I'm-a-trendy-import-shit-you-can-buy-to-impress-your-friends-with-what-a-fuck-postyuppy-you-are factor, but still, taken as a whole, Ikea sucks.

And their web site designer needs to die in a fire. Twice (a reliable necromancer may be employed for this purpose). They are a fuckshit Scandihellian company with a piss-smell web site which should not be permitted to conduct business in the Republic of California. I'm sure there are laws on the books -- California has a section of civil code to outlaw everything, even reading this blog -- which cover web sites specifically designed to make it god fuck damn impossible to contact customer service, except by means which they've tailored to *their* convenience.

So here's my story. I bought a desk on Craigslist. Yay, Craigslist, free classified ads for the masses. Of course, the prior owner is moving, and, of course, she doesn't have all the hardware. No biggie. You buys your shit used, you takes your chances.

So I go to the hardware store. Orchard Supply Hardware, in Glendale. Ask the first semi-uniformed face I see for some help. Happens to be a girl. A girl who, while technically not jailbait, is nonetheless far too young for me even to consider flirting with her. Damn. I open my little Zippered Pouch o' Shit™ to retrieve the parts I need, and show her them, and she says, "Oh! That looks like something from some knock-together furniture." Of course, I'm no bloody carpenter: I'm seventeen stone and I have dainty little white-collar-man's fingers. Fuck off.

The cutie leads me to their aisle of assorted parts (no body parts, sad to say, just washers and grommets and grunkets and gloobles), helps me not-find what I need. They don't carry it, because it's proprietary, like everything IBM ever manufactured. MotherFUCK. I thank the hottie, make a mental note to reincarnate as a child molester in Southeast Asia, and go on my way.

When I get home, I look up Ikea's web site: it is a shit that needs wiping up. I spent fifteen minutes negotiating their sorry-assed excuse for a web site. No luck. By pure luck and caprice of the gods (I waved a dowsing rod over the monitor), I did, in fact, manage to locate Ikea's toll-free customer annoyance number.

Let me tell you, *that* was a worthless shit of a phone call.

So I have to go to the Ikea store. In Burbank. I have arranged to have a tooth pulled before I go there, so as to take advantage of the brain's pain-gating mechanism.

I hate Ikea. Ikea sucks. You suck too, come to think of it.