“‘So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz…’ that’s it! Haha!” -Janis Joplin, American Rock Singer
A simple shopping trip to IKEA quickly turned to nothing but absolute chaos. After work, I decided it was time to go to IKEA to furnish my apartment. The plan was, buy a bed frame, desk, bookshelf, wardrobe and file cabinet. I was to rent a van from IKEA/Hertz, bring it all home and assemble it between Sunday night and Tuesday morning (I am pretty good at procrastinating) A good friend will be spending the night and I feel like it would be a good idea to have furniture and be able to organize my room. I found all my items, loaded it all up onto my cart and that’s where everything went a bit wrong.
I paid and went to the automated station to rent the IKEA/Hertz van. First, it was completely in German which was fine because I can fill out German forms easily enough. Unfortunately, after going through everything, there was a video that asked me questions about it before I was able to rent the van. Due to this, I had to switch to English, the app restarted and there was an error on the screen, something like, “The camera will not function properly due to (whatever blah blah)” I just clicked okay because the camera didn’t matter. I went through the whole process again, video, questions and all. Then I finished the sign-up and then it said that now I have to take out my ID card/ drivers license/ etc so that it can scan them…. and of course the camera didn’t work. So after talking to customer service and IKEA employees, the decision was that it might be better to just use the website to sign up. There is a requirement that you have to rent a car 15 minutes prior to the rental (which has to be at :00, :15, :30, and :45 of each hour) so I had to move my rental back from 19:45 to 20:00. I went through the whole thing where I had to make an account and verify it. Then I had to start the rental process, I went through it and when I entered my credit card information, I got an error because I accidentally typed in the wrong number of my credit card. When I re-entered my information the 15-minute window had passed, so my rental had to, incredibly annoyingly, be pushed back to 20:15. Then again, I had to go back and type in all my information again and finally it worked. So it was about 20:00 and I had 15 minutes to kill. I decided to walk to the van and just hang out. On my way to the van, the gigantic trolley I was pushing with all my stuff hit a bump and it fell over and all the plates, bowls and cups I decided to grab fell and all but 3 cups, 2 plates, and a bowl all broke. After cleaning that up, I made it to the rental van and checked my email. I had an e-mail confirmation about the reservation. IKEA closed at 20:00 so I just chilled while everyone was leaving work or packing up the stuff they bought today. At 20:15, I was watching my phone so that I can get the keypad code for the van. However, the code never came. After 20:20, I decided to ask someone for help. I was brought to the night security guard and he called Hertz for me.
The issue was that they didn’t have my personal documents on file so they couldn’t rent me the car until I gave it to them. They needed a scan of my driver license, proof of residence and my passport… two of those things were at my apartment, and not at IKEA… So I was told that I couldn’t rent the van at all. I can not come up with any possible explanation as to why the website allowed me to rent a car, pay them for the booking and tell me that the PIN code was going to be sent to me at 20:15 without ever warning me. In my opinion, it needed to tell me when I went to set up the rental that it needed more information.
So after waiting and waiting, I was told by the security guard that the second IKEA building that has my desk and chair has closed and I won’t be able to go and get the other, very important part of my room and I would have to come back the next day and deal with this all over again.
Then, one of the people leaving offered to help bring my stuff home which was so kind and lovely… but then she saw how much stuff I had and told me that unfortunately, that would never fit in her car. So I was left with no other option than to call a large taxi and try to stuff it all it. What ended up coming was a nice Mercedes-Benz station wagon. So in the rain, if I didn’t mention it already it was also cold and raining a little, I loaded up the Mercedes and tried to jam everything in and we kind of barely got it to fit.
I was driven home by this quiet but nice older guy. We missed my apartment but it didn’t really matter, we turned around, parked in the street and he helped me dump all my stuff on the side of the street. After that, I paid him, he drove away and now I had to lug all the individual boxes, of which there was about nine up three flights of stairs to my apartment. Luckily for me, I was able to manage it with a lot of sweat and a little help. Now, my bedroom is all my stuff piled up on the floor, nine huge IKEA boxes and I still haven’t even received all of it.
Tomorrow I have to go back to IKEA, bring them the receipt for my desk and either figure out a way to get it home or just pay them to ship it to me from the store… They will ship it from the store, no matter the cost because I am never doing that again.
So now I go to bed in a room that now I can officially say, has furniture, just nothing put together.