THE SURLIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Okay, I guess that headline is something of a misnomer, not least because I couldn’t possibly know whether or not she was actually the surliest woman in the world, but it certainly felt like it as I ended the call which arrived completely out of the blue on my work mobile on one recent mid-morning.

Hmm... Maybe it wasn't even completely out of the blue, either (I am, after all, prone to hyperbole...) but the call was rather unexpected and, as the saying goes, took me unawares... (“No, missus! Not me underwears... Oh, please yourselves!”)

Perhaps I ought to explain the back story...

With a certain amount - but not all - of the decorating in a state which might reasonably be termed done, we were able to head out to IKEA on a recent Sunday and order the necessary wardrobes in which to hopefully finally place at least some of the mountains of clobber that we removed to other rooms when the builders were on the brink of showing up.

The catalogues had been consulted, and the budget more or less allocated courtesy of that lovely Mr Mastercard, and we knew exactly what we required and that they were likely to be rather huge, and certainly far too huge to fit in our little car no matter how “flat-packed” they were. Actually, it turned out that transporting them ourselves was not an option which the store was prepared to countenance anyway, and we would have to add on a delivery charge and arrange to be in so that burly strangers could drop the various parcels off on some agreed date, and place them in the desired room just as long as they would not have to climb more than one flight of stairs in order to do so.

So far, so fair enough. Despite descriptions to the contrary, Blogfordshire Towers is no mansion after all.

Now, given the scale of these wardrobes, and our current ongoing state of utter exhaustion, as well as a certain lack of robustness in both of our spines lately, we had decided to opt out of the DIY rat race for once and actually pay someone else to put together these three-dimensional puzzles for us, which still feels like an expensive cop-out and admission of utter failure to my “inner bloke” but did most probably mean that it would at least get done sometime in the very near future, and, perhaps more importantly, actually done properly and without too much swearing, personal injury and dropping large lumps of timber (or whatever) on my hands, feet or head.

Happily my “manliness” wasn’t going to come under any scrutiny from the “real men” who would be doing the job, as the Beloved had decided that she was going to take those days off to be in when it was all being done, and, I thought, perhaps she could do the pretending to be the “little woman” act for them which usually makes them slightly more patronising, but also more malleable.

Sadly, having agreed most of the details in the store at the time, for some reason, this meant that, on that fateful Monday morning I was telephoned by the surliest woman in the world from the IKEA subcontractors to arrange the build.

After the usual preliminaries about order numbers and dates and so forth had been grumpily agreed upon, the interrogation could truly begin.

“You have measured to check that there’s 240cm space to the ceiling?” she growled.

Well, I knew that the wardrobes would fit in the space, because I’d measured the height of the room at the time, but the number she mentioned was slightly more than the height of the cabinets we’d ordered and I couldn’t be 100% certain, but I couldn’t do much about it right then, given that I was at work…

“You need to be sure because when they put the doors on it gets taller...”

Eh...?

We moved on...

“There’ll be an additional charge £10 for each piece that we have to attach to the wall, so that’s three items, which brings it to £XXX…” Which was, of course, exactly the same as the figure they had told us in the store, although they hadn’t gone into the details of precisely what that additional thirty quid was for.

“Um… Okay…!"

“And there will be enough room for them to work…?”

How the Dickens should I know...?

“Well… How much will they need…?”

“They need to be able to lay it flat and walk around it...”

“I’m sure it will be fine...”

“And if the items aren’t in the room, there’ll be a charge of £5 per fifteen minutes for moving things if they have to…”

“Well, isn’t that up to the delivery people…?”

“It’s in your delivery terms an conditions...”

“Well, there we are then...”

And so it went on, until the call ended with me feeling a very unsavoury taste about the whole exchange and wondering whether these were quite the sort of company that I actually wanted coming to my house. The confirmation email arrived later and I forwarded it on to the Beloved for her to read through, but we both felt a sudden desire to cancel their service and find other means to get it done given the slightly unsatisfactory sense of customer service and obsession with little add-ons that our relationship with this company had left us feeling.

After all, when you decide to get someone in to do something, what you really want is for it to add to your levels of anxiety, don’t you...?

And I’m still wondering how exactly putting the doors on would somehow add to the overall height of the thing…?

Not the happiest ten minutes of my life, but then I really don’t like dealing with “real” people… and, in the end, I’m sure it’ll be fine...