One of my kids broke my wife’s decorative wall mirror. I’ve got to hand it to them. Usually when one of them does something bad, the other two rat them out instantly.  All three are staying mum as to who did it. So either one of them is calling in favors, they really don’t know who broke it, or they all broke it together. I’m figuring #3.

We couldn’t just replace it with a regular mirror, because my wife built a decorative wall hanger thingy. (I don’t know, she watches those housy shows and is way more constructive than I am) so we have to have the exact same size mirror.

So my wife dispatched me to Ikea. We have an Ikea directly across the freeway from FBMG, so it was supposed to be easier for me to pick up a new Kolja. I love how everything at Ikea has a weird name, like it isn’t 32″ round mirror, it is a Kolja. You can also purchase Lofkas, Brimpas, Huffalumps, Skordingers, and Fragglerocks. If I was writing an epic fantasy novel sword and sorcery kind of thing, I would just use the Ikea catalog to come up with names.  I bet Dungeon Masters everywhere keep a copy of that thing handy. “Random encounter, (rolls dice) Barbarians! And the leader’s name is… (flips pages) Kraghor! Kraghor of… Fricka!”

At lunch I entered Ikea and wandered through the warehouse from Indiana Jones for forty-five minutes looking for mirrors. Women really like Ikea, but I just don’t get it. Now if I was single however, I would totally hang out here, because this is apparently where all of the good looking women in their thirties are. Which makes sense, since Mrs. Correia is in her thirties, and is smoking hot. Yes, I am that lucky. It is good to be king.

So as I’m wandering through this mega store (Yes, Sir, the Koljas are across from the Oderslipins and the Octopussies, turn left when you enter the Gnome Kingdom and follow Fafnir the Wolf to Odin’s Throne. They’re beneath the hooves of Trumpflarn the Magic Unicorn) and I finally pick up the mirror, walk the 2 kilometers (It is a European store, so it is metric) to checkout, only to discover that even though there are 50 cash registers, there are exactly 3 open. And all 3 of them are the self-checkout lines.  Sweet! European style efficiency! I usually have to go to Walmart for this kind of service!

This is the LAST place that anybody should have to try to do a self checkout.  So I’m standing in line behind 300 attractive women and 4,000 screaming kids who are moving piles of furniture trying to find the barcode on a sofa (sorry, a Flugsnor), and we’re all waiting on a grandma who can’t figure out how to input her Grippen or her Luffapo (which I personally thought was an illegal sex act from Thailand, which shows how out of touch I am with the Ikea world!).  It was a painful wait.

If you can afford a six million square foot warehouse, then you can open another damn cash register. I don’t care if all your employees have birdflu, somebody get out here and find the friggin’ barcode on grandma’s Luffapo, now damn it!   

So it took me over an hour to buy a $20 mirror. Unnaceptable Ikea! Your Viking forfathers would be so offended that they would pillage many villages for that!  I’m so offended that I won’t be shopping at Ikea again. (which doesn’t really say anything, since I’ve only been there once before when it opened because my wife dragged me along, and my son wandered off and became Ikea of Utah’s first Code Adam missing child. We found him beating up another three year old over control of one of those games with the little sliding blocks of wood, so I bought him some meatballs)  So no more Ikea for me.

Well, at least until my wife makes me go pick up something else.