Ikea Frustration

Saturday, 15 August 1998

A bit of a frustrating day today. Chris and I woke up fairly early for a Saturday (around nineish in the AM), and I figured to head in to Manhattan to pick up birthday gifts for my grandfather and sister, which I really ought to have taken care of earlier in the week, and to catch the free shuttle bus to the New Jersey branch of Ikea to pick up some cheap cutlery (my 1997 Ikea catalog lists a 20-piece set of "Traktat" cutlery for US$9.95). See, our sink is so full if unwashed dishes that I figure the best solution is to toss out what we've got and start over. We've already got a spare set of unused dishes that Chris's relatives gave us, so all we need is the cutlery. And being limited to four settings worth of dishware would force us to wash the dishes more frequently.

According to the 1997 Ikea catalog, the shuttle bus starts from the Ikea Manhattan showroom at 57th and Lexington. So after showers, dressing, and checking email and Usenet, at around noon Chris and I headed off to Wo-Hop's (the basement version) on Mott Street for breakfast, where I had a bowl of shrimp congee and a couple of egg rolls. Then we went our separate ways, me up to 57th Street and she down to J&R's music department to see if anything interesting was on sale. I arrived at the appropriate corner to find that the Ikea Manhattan showroom had either moved or ceased to exist entirely, probably the latter since the yellow pages I borrowed from a nearby security guard didn't list it. I didn't feel like paying US$2.40 to call the New Jersey branch and ask what was going on, so I headed down to Crossover to see if the office had a more recent copy of the catalog (it didn't) and check things out on the web.

The Ikea website is a marvel of uselessness. It's not as useless as it used to be, with so heavy a reliance on frames and JavaScript as to make it unusable to those without those capabilities, but it's still not good. Why can't I get on the mailing list for their catalog over the web? Why can't I see the prices and specifications for their whole catalog? Why doesn't the website have the actual information about the New York shuttle bus instead of a phone number? Do they really think I'd prefer an online coloring book to any of these features? Well, at least armed with a 1-800 number for bus info, I was able to find out that the bus now left from the Port Authority (a more logical place for it, I'll admit), and that the last bus of the day had left about 15 minutes earlier.

So, off to Barnes & Noble to shop for gifts, where I discovered that the new They Might Be Giants album, Severe Tire Damage, was out. Huzzah! And then off to Bradlee's to see what they had in the way of cheap cutlery. Not much, as it turned out, but they did have a sale on cookie sheets, and a good spatula, and a nifty-looking DK book on spices. I've got the CD in my computer's CD drive now (just finished "First Kiss," starting "Spider"), and I'm wondering why the CD app shows 24 tracks when the CD case lists only 17.

Ah, that explains it -- the last seven are "hidden" tracks. The 17th track, "About Me," has a couple of minutes of silence at the end, tricking the naïve listener into thinking that the CD has ended. The titles for the final tracks, according to Amazon.com, are:

18. "Planet of the Apes"
19. "Return of the Planet of the Apes"
20. "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes"
21. "Escape from the Planet of the Apes"
22. "Battle for the Planet of the Apes"
23. "Beneath the Planet of the Apes"
24. "This Ape's For You"