Post by Canetoad on Apr 27, 2008 8:02:35 GMT -5
OK fellas... this is actually quite a popular subject on another forum Toad lurks in - basically jjust tell it like it is: rant, vent, and rail about what is giving you the shiits...
I'll kick it of with an occassional Toad column:
WHEN there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.
So read the tag-line to George A. Romero’s seminal 1978 zombie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead.
The apocalypse is upon us, and a rag tag bunch of survivors escape the hordes of flesh-eating undead by holing up in a shopping mall. Inside, the re-animated corpses are still lurching past the specialty stores and pushing empty shopping carts. Outside, they’re clamouring to get in.
‘’What are they doing? Why do they come here?’’
’’Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.’’
Much has been written of the socio-political sub-text to Romero’s films. Personally, I think fans of the genre have over analysed his work - particularly Dawn of the Dead, which is obviously a very prescient metaphor for that 21st century phenomenon known as the IKEA experience.
For surely, if we are talking allegories about blind consumerism, then IKEA must truly be Hell on Earth.
A person’s first IKEA experience is one of those life moments that leave you forever scarred – a bit like finding your cat run over on the side of the road, or walking in on your grandparents having sex.
It is just a whole barrel of wrong.
I had my first (and last) IKEA moment recently.
It was, to be honest, my fault. We’d just finished renovating the living room – not only because it was a tad tired and dingy but also because there were problems accommodating my film collection and the *cough... ahem* rather large plasma television that had been purchased without prior approval from her Long Sufferingness.
Putting aside for one moment the near divorce that that little moment of profligacy caused – aided and abetted by a few glasses of amber courage – it was now time to do the storage thing.
I had thought IKEA stores were like Bunnings in that a new one sprouted in handy positions every second week. But no, there’s only one, and buried so deep in the wilds of the southern outskirts of Brisbane that had we driven for another hour or so the next freeway exit would have indicated the turnoff for Newcastle.
Anyway, there it was finally… rearing from the surrounding landscape like a giant blue and yellow concrete tumor.
IKEA isn’t a shop, it’s a bloody self-contained city. The parking lot alone would dwarf a small Pacific island nation, and probably accounted for more bitumen than the Tugun bypass.
Luckily I was wearing my best Iron Maiden t-shirt, so I seemed to blend in nicely with the rest of the throng that was wending its way through the car spaces to the shopping mecca lying in wait above us.
They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember…Remember that they want to be in here.
IKEA doesn’t have an entrance, it has a foyer… with huge signs and helpful little IKEA munchkins directing you to the IKEA restaurant (a hungry shopper is a bad shopper), the IKEA dunnies and the IKEA child care centre.
But this was to be a hit and run raid: one entertainment unit and accompanying shelving, in and out with military precision.
Yair right.
If IKEA were serious about their shopping experience they’d hand out GPS navigation units as you entered.
I’m convinced that the place is south east Queensland’s equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, with entire families entering its vortex and just disappearing… perhaps with their mummified remains being washed up years later under a tasteful 8 piece plastic outdoor setting.
Suffice to say the entertainment unit the bride had spotted in a catalogue wouldn’t accommodate my new television, and the other options were accompanied by assembly instructions that looked like a circuit wiring diagram for the space shuttle.
While we deliberated our next move and narrowly avoided another television-related domestic, all around us the dead walked.
They lumbered, they shuffled, they pushed their prams and their shopping carts, and herded their overweight progeny, oblivious to anyone around them… chewing their cuds and consulting their catalogues in a slack-jawed trance.
Honestly, if they’d tied to rip a chunk of flesh from a passing human, I wouldn’t have been that surprised.
Escape was in order, but urgent flight from IKEA is not something they encourage.
Short of triggering the alarms by using one of the fire doors (which I did seriously suggest) there is no way to exit the place in swift fashion.
IKEA is designed so that if you enter with the intention of obtaining a lampshade you can’t leave without buying a new barbeque, dinner setting, a trolley full of useless bric a brac and a migraine.
The only positive about the experience was the three kilometre walk to get out of the place accounted for the day’s exercise.
Honestly, Steve McQueen had an easier time of it engineering his breakout in Papillon.
So when the dead walk, let me give you a tip – take your chances on the streets, because IKEA will have been the first place annexed by Hell.
I'll kick it of with an occassional Toad column:
WHEN there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.
So read the tag-line to George A. Romero’s seminal 1978 zombie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead.
The apocalypse is upon us, and a rag tag bunch of survivors escape the hordes of flesh-eating undead by holing up in a shopping mall. Inside, the re-animated corpses are still lurching past the specialty stores and pushing empty shopping carts. Outside, they’re clamouring to get in.
‘’What are they doing? Why do they come here?’’
’’Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.’’
Much has been written of the socio-political sub-text to Romero’s films. Personally, I think fans of the genre have over analysed his work - particularly Dawn of the Dead, which is obviously a very prescient metaphor for that 21st century phenomenon known as the IKEA experience.
For surely, if we are talking allegories about blind consumerism, then IKEA must truly be Hell on Earth.
A person’s first IKEA experience is one of those life moments that leave you forever scarred – a bit like finding your cat run over on the side of the road, or walking in on your grandparents having sex.
It is just a whole barrel of wrong.
I had my first (and last) IKEA moment recently.
It was, to be honest, my fault. We’d just finished renovating the living room – not only because it was a tad tired and dingy but also because there were problems accommodating my film collection and the *cough... ahem* rather large plasma television that had been purchased without prior approval from her Long Sufferingness.
Putting aside for one moment the near divorce that that little moment of profligacy caused – aided and abetted by a few glasses of amber courage – it was now time to do the storage thing.
I had thought IKEA stores were like Bunnings in that a new one sprouted in handy positions every second week. But no, there’s only one, and buried so deep in the wilds of the southern outskirts of Brisbane that had we driven for another hour or so the next freeway exit would have indicated the turnoff for Newcastle.
Anyway, there it was finally… rearing from the surrounding landscape like a giant blue and yellow concrete tumor.
IKEA isn’t a shop, it’s a bloody self-contained city. The parking lot alone would dwarf a small Pacific island nation, and probably accounted for more bitumen than the Tugun bypass.
Luckily I was wearing my best Iron Maiden t-shirt, so I seemed to blend in nicely with the rest of the throng that was wending its way through the car spaces to the shopping mecca lying in wait above us.
They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember…Remember that they want to be in here.
IKEA doesn’t have an entrance, it has a foyer… with huge signs and helpful little IKEA munchkins directing you to the IKEA restaurant (a hungry shopper is a bad shopper), the IKEA dunnies and the IKEA child care centre.
But this was to be a hit and run raid: one entertainment unit and accompanying shelving, in and out with military precision.
Yair right.
If IKEA were serious about their shopping experience they’d hand out GPS navigation units as you entered.
I’m convinced that the place is south east Queensland’s equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, with entire families entering its vortex and just disappearing… perhaps with their mummified remains being washed up years later under a tasteful 8 piece plastic outdoor setting.
Suffice to say the entertainment unit the bride had spotted in a catalogue wouldn’t accommodate my new television, and the other options were accompanied by assembly instructions that looked like a circuit wiring diagram for the space shuttle.
While we deliberated our next move and narrowly avoided another television-related domestic, all around us the dead walked.
They lumbered, they shuffled, they pushed their prams and their shopping carts, and herded their overweight progeny, oblivious to anyone around them… chewing their cuds and consulting their catalogues in a slack-jawed trance.
Honestly, if they’d tied to rip a chunk of flesh from a passing human, I wouldn’t have been that surprised.
Escape was in order, but urgent flight from IKEA is not something they encourage.
Short of triggering the alarms by using one of the fire doors (which I did seriously suggest) there is no way to exit the place in swift fashion.
IKEA is designed so that if you enter with the intention of obtaining a lampshade you can’t leave without buying a new barbeque, dinner setting, a trolley full of useless bric a brac and a migraine.
The only positive about the experience was the three kilometre walk to get out of the place accounted for the day’s exercise.
Honestly, Steve McQueen had an easier time of it engineering his breakout in Papillon.
So when the dead walk, let me give you a tip – take your chances on the streets, because IKEA will have been the first place annexed by Hell.
Corpsekiller
Grizzled HMaM Vet
. (and no, you can't wait in the car ck)
