Monday 5 April 2010

Dear So & So

Dear Mr Ikea,

just a quick question. Really, I won't take much of your time. I mean, I know how busy you must be, designing all that furniture and travelling round Sweden taking photographs of all sorts of good-looking people showing us how to use tables, chairs, cutlery and other difficult stuff like that. I should - I live in a house almost entirely furnished by your store in Moscow, after all, and believe me, given the time it takes me to put some of your flat-packed furniture together (bookshelves, anyone?), I can't imagine how long it must take you to design it...

Anyway, I do just have one teensy question.

If you can design all this clever stuff (pull-out sofa beds, for example... Who would have thought of putting a special drawer underneath to store your guest bedding in, that doubles up as somewhere useful to hide the rolls of wrapping paper from your sons who are convinced that the shiny red cellophane one is the spitting image of a Jedi light-sabre and therefore ideal for beating the living daylights out of each other with? Genius...), I just wondered...

Why on earth do you make the barcode stickers on the top of your storage boxes so bloody difficult to remove?

Yours, (in search of a plaster following an unfortunate incident with a table knife and the label on top of a certain storage box),

Potty Mummy.


PS - if you want to watch something really funny, (and which I had nothing to do with) I recommend you check out this link to a video by Dan & Dan (courtesy of an inital pointer from Powder Room Graffiti). Go on - you know you want to.

7 comments:

  1. I love Dan and Dan... only introduced to them recently though. Have you checked out the Daily Mail song?

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  2. Blimey, I hope IKEA give English instructions even in Moscow. Otherwise, IKEA assembly in Cyrillic would be some kind of weird vision of purgatory.

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  3. Probably even more to the point - why put the barcodes on top of the boxes? If they were on the underside we could just totally ignore their existence and save a fortune in swear-box penalties and sticking plasters.

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  4. Me too PlanB - and yes, I loved the Daily Mail song!

    Iota, luckily most of Ikea's instructions are in picture format. Otherwise I would totally in the poo...

    Sharon, excellent point. Will you write to them, or shall I?

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  5. You're right! They are impossible. I ended up just leaving them on the lids of some of the kids' toy boxes. Couldn't be bothered any more.

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  6. I haven't had the problem of the barcode actually being on the furniture yet. There must be some people in some countries who must think that's acceptable, or they are very neurotic. I wouldn't try it with a knife, how about a hairdryer to melt the glue? Would that work?

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  7. hee hee. how i hope u sent this.
    and if you didn't, do so immediately!
    http://marketingtomilk.wordpress.com

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Go on - you know you want to...