The Ikea Saga

Although we moved into a furnished apartment here in Stockholm we still had to take the metro to Skärholmen to visit Ikea at Kungens Kurva - the world's largest Ikea.

As mentioned the apartment was furnished so we didn't have to resort to such extreme measures as seen in the second picture: the poster advertising a quite nice exhibit on Ikea at Liljevalchs Konsthal.

In fact, we limited ourselves to the few things we could easily carry home on the metro and decided to order a bed and a rocking chair for delivery from Ikea. This would turn out to become quite the story.

For one thing, it turned out that goods cannot be ordered from the Ikea homepage without a Swedish issued visa card. So before we could even get started we had to wait for Tue's bank to issue one of those. Then followed more waiting: Ikea needed a couple of weeks before calling us up to arrange the details regarding delivery. At this point they told us that one of the items we ordered wasn't ready for delivery but that they would ship it later via the mail service - due to the Swedish/Danish language gap we didn't quite catch what exactly was missing. Lisbeth was the one who had to stay home to receive the delivery from Ikea. We were expecting to receive fewer items than we had ordered - so we were very confused when we realised (after the Ikea truck had left) that we couldn't see anything missing, but rather that Ikea had delivered one bed too many (!!!)

We assembled the bed we did want, and also the rocking chair and still couldn't see what was missing. Then we called Ikea to tell them they had delivered one bed more than we had ordered. This information was very difficult for them to process - obviously this wasn't a customer issue they had any kind of routine in handling. But at long last they promised us they could send a guy out to pick it up a mere two weeks later - well, what was the hurry, it was only blocking half our hallway.

Then it was Tue's turn stay home and receive - or rather: to let go. The bed was out the door as agreed upon and since we didn't get any curious extra bills from Ikea we started to think that the whole thing was finally settled. That lasted until we - driving on the highway between Amsterdam and Rotterdam - got a phone call from Ikea: They wanted to arrange for a delivery time for the missing goods of our order. At first we thought they had gotten the info about the extra bed confused after all and wanted to deliver yet another bed, but in the end we understood that the things they had originally promised to ship by mail service were finally ready and they wanted to deliver them now. So Tue had to stay home one more day. When the mysterious package had been delivered it turned out to be covers for the pillows in the rocking chair - something we still hadn't realised was missing.