A Blue Couch, Silver Keys and a Gold Piece of Whatever

1 September 2022

 

Ikea demands of its customers/victims both love and hate.  Take for example the blue couch. The most recent thing we got from Ikea was “the” blue couch.  It has some storge under it and it pulls out into a bed for visitors.  Like most things Ikea in comes in parts, a fair but not unwieldly number of parts.  The key factor at Ikea however is price.  You know that.  I know that. We love the price.  We hate what follows.

 

When you buy something from Ikea the model has been expertly set up.  All the parts are sure to have been milled to the right tolerances. If one doesn’t quite fit you can be assured that Joao can call Sven in the backroom and get a replacement part asap. The staff doing set up in-store use electric tools and have flunkies who lift and twist the item exactly the way it is shown in the pictographic instructions.  When you ask the sales rep, “How long does it take to assemble?”, he or she says (they appear quite committed to parity in sales staff), “Oh twenty or thirty minutes.”  What they leave off is that part that says, “If you are a highly toned underemployed mechanical engineer”.

 

I loved Legos as a kid.  On the Iowa Skills Test I always got the folding the boxes section 100% right, always.  I live with an engineer.  How hard could this be? Insert echoing cosmic laughter here.

 

Well, assembling the blue couch had its moments.  For fabric, batting and light colored wood, it was heavy. On top of that the couch had to be tilted on its side several times to accomplish the tasks assigned.  Again, I live with two big men so it was doable. But what drove me crazy was installing one long thick bolt that held the back of the couch to the seat of the couch.  There were four of these, two on the left, one on the center and one on the right.  The left and right ones went it without a hitch. The center one not so much. Seemingly the bolt would go in and start to thread into the approved slot and then just spin.

 

Apparently, and definitely not in the pictograms, this bolt was the prime bolt and had to go in first.  It took loosening the other three bolts and using a cardboard shim to elevate one side of the project to allow the bolt to catch and go in.  Every single freakin’ project from Ikea is like this.  There is always a hidden thing you have to do to get the bits and bobs to align. Twenty minutes of estimated set-up time was for an overweight, old, humanities orient retired ALJ nigh onto three hours to finish.  Sigh.

 

Did I mention this place is not air conditioned?  After I let the sweat dry, I made it my goal to get my Portuguese phone number up and running.  This would require me to go to MEO one of the providers of internet/cable/phone in the country. MEO has various sales offices everywhere. No worries my trusty app said there was a shop five minutes’ walk from here.  Don’t get me started on the five minute’s walk thing.  If Lisbon were perfectly flat it would be five minutes’ walk.  Lisbon I can say with certainty is not perfectly flat. Off I went for the five-minute walk.

 

Why did I have to go to MEO?  Two things.  First, I didn’t have a tool that would open the sim slot on my iPhone 12Max or whatever it is called.  Second, I wanted to know the fee structure for using my phone for international texting.  I didn’t really get an answer for the second one except that the sales rep kept saying, very expensive.  However, all the MEO reps have that little piece of wire to pop open the iPhone and the SIM was quickly placed in my phone.  

 

The serendipity bit was that the store we went to was next to a very neat/cool looking building with lots of frill and gimgacks and gogaws to ah and oh at.  And this building was right next to the Piscoas metro stop which for all the world looks like one of Paris’s art deco metro stops.  More aahing and oohing.

The keys thing was a truly typical Portuguese urban moment.  We had one key for four people.  I had inquired of our landlady about how to get extra keys.  She directed me to a shop several blocks away.  Thirty-six dollars later I had four new keys.  However, at 10 pm (22:00) a knock on our interior door came and a young woman was standing outside.  She did not identify herself but she handed up about fifty loose keys and said, “These are yours”.  There were multiple keys to the apartment, to a second entrance to the apartment, to our mailbox and to a couple of other things I have not figured out yet.  Yep, it was that kind of moment.  I am kind of thinking she was some kind of phantom because upon handing us this mound of shaped metal she was gone.

Oh yeah to insure I don’t blow my heart out I bought an American style coffee maker and some decaf coffee.  I have tried ordering decaf espressos and I think about 50% of the time that just say to hell with it and make me a regular.  I can tell it is regular when my fingers start tapping the table after my second sip.  If I drink it all my whole body become a techno rhythm section.

 

And that is all I have time for this morning.