The Ballad of Bookcase Billy: An IKEA Survival Guide

We survived IKEA! We did it! Yay for us!

This weekend, Pam (as in the hit song "Pam Shaffer is eating a vanilla wafer") and I made a daring trek to the desolate land of cheap, household goods. IKEA incites terror within me, because it reminds me of what would happen if you combined all of the following anxiety-causing locales into one retail store: a rat maze, Guantanamo Bay, the Amsterdam airport, Wal-Mart and "the running of the bulls in Pamplona."

Because of IKEA's intensity, Pam and I felt it necessary to frontload the trip with the conscious choice to survive. This resulted in an amazingly entertaining three hours...so amazing that we didn't just survive IKEA...we became the IKEA champions!

Here's your official how-to guide for surviving and enjoying a day at IKEA:

1. Take a camera. Because any day in a retail store is somehow funnier if you can capture moments like "Pam chilling on a living room suite that's been set up in the IKEA parking garage." "Hey honey! What do you want to watch tonight? The volvo or the BMW?"
   
   
2. Read the signs outloud. Because all of the signs in IKEA have an english name and a Swedish name. The day's made much funnier if you can say, "Hey Pam, are you interested in a Fjallsta for your bathroom or an Ektorp Muren for the living room?" (Or in this case, a "billy.")
   
   
   
3. Make new friends. Obviously naming and befriending inanimate objects is a necessary coping mechanism for survival in any high-risk situation. (Think "Wilson the Volleyball" in Castaway.) Pam and I chose a posable artistic figurine, and we named him "Billy" in honor of the aformentioned Swedish Bookcase.
   
   Billy became the day's hero. He helped to personify the emotions we were feeling through the experience, and as it turns out, he's very photogenic.
   
   We nearly lost him at the halfway point. When we returned to Billy after our Swedish lunch, it was apparent that he had a desire to end his life by throwing himself from the shopping cart. (Apparently IKEA is as stressful to the merchandise as it is to the customers.)
   
   And Billy defended us from the more aggressive merchandise. Here, he defends against an assailant who tried to take the last set of blue tealight holders.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Eat some meatballs. IKEA has its own restaurant, and by 12:30, we were starving. I said, "Pam, I am hungry. We will eat meatballs." And it was an enjoyable lunch (if you could tune out the hordes of screaming toddlers in the cafeteria demanding more meatballs.)
   
   And I'm convinced that the midpoint "stop and eat" break is completely necessary to making the overall IKEA experience bearable. How can you not be refreshed when you get 5 meatballs, fries, and a Diet Coke for $2.18?
   
   
5. Read the tutorials. Sometimes in IKEA, there's no way to understand what they're trying to sell you without reading the instructions. This proved to be true during Pam and I's attempt to buy the perfect down comforters. Apparently, there are a lot of variables. So--reading the instructions proved vital (as did throwing ourselves onto the mock beds in supreme melodramatic fashion to ensure the perfect down quilt was purchased.) We both settled on an "Extra Warm Down Quilt" named Mysa Sol.
   
   
6. Enjoy a post-IKEA debriefing time. Pam and I couldn't just leave IKEA and drive home. There would have been too much culture shock. So upon loading up our cart full of cheap household goods, we enjoyed Seattle's best cup of coffee (at Cafe Ladro, if you're wondering) and then spent two hours in the Lynnwood Guitar Center, jamming on really expensive Martin's and Taylor's. (The highlight of this experience was a blues guitarist who did some fantastic lead solos with Pam's amazing rhythm guitar and my impromptu vocals. Rock on!)
   

So all in all, IKEA day turned out well. Pam and I even went beyond survival to a straight-up "suck the marrow out of life" type IKEA experience. We proudly avoided "IKEA Syndrome" a term coined by my token Scandanavian friend Sonja, which she defines as what happens "when people lose all sense of normal social cues and manners because of all the stuff, made worse by the maze likeness of the overall store layout."

I think if we consulted Billy on this matter, he'd simply say that "We are the champions!"