Not The World's Greatest
Och, laddie!
So my week’s going okay! But do you want to hear about my weekend? The weekend of doom?? Because this is the weekend when I think I finally lost all the little dignity I’d managed to muster… and now that that’s gone, I can just admit defeat and go around telling everybody about it.
So a while ago, I wrote something in my diary about how Ikea is a really dangerous place to be. We’ve all been there right, that moment between hovering indecision and buying up just about the whole store. You go there thinking, “I’ll just look at all the pretty colours!” and then you come home with bookshelf, a rug, a clock, a painting and some brightly-coloured plastic thing that looks like it’s been ergonomically designed to crush garlic. Oh, and a couch.
I mean, these people really know what they’re doing!
Now though, it’s become deadly for a whole ‘nother reason.
As always, my family was weaving madly in and out of Ikea like in Supermarket Sweep.
(Have you ever seen that game show? It was just amazing… it was actually held in a supermarket and the participants spent about fifteen minutes playing price and product related games against each other. The last five minutes of the show was my favourite though – they took turns to run through the WHOLE supermarket just grabbing stuff and throwing it into a trolley and at the end, the one with the stuff in the trolley worth the most amount of money won and got to keep the cash! It was absolutely insane how they would go apeshit and clear stuff off the shelves with their arms… and the aisles were interspersed with big air-filled balloons shaped like product mascots that were worth hidden amounts to be revealed at the end of the run – the Jolly Green Giant was worth $500!
I used to get really excited during the Sweep segment when I was about ten or so, mainly because I was convinced that I would beat the shit out of every other competitor because I knew which things were worth the most. I mean obviously, meat, gourmet food and beauty products, right? And I had my strategy down pat, I would run straight to the gourmet stuff and shove the whole shelf into the trolley instead of daintily picking out items like most of the wimpy contestants did. The most frustrating thing would be when some idiot woman who’d obviously never shopped for anything for her family in her life would run straight to the canned aisle and throw tin after tin of peas into her cart while I would be jumping up and down and shouting, “Go for the turkey! GO FOR THE GODDAMN TURKEYARRRGGAARGHAAAARGGHHH!” Some months later, I tried to simulate my own version of the Sweep at my local Cold Storage… but that’s another tale for another time…)
ANYWAY. So we were running through Ikea right, and some dimbulb comes up with the brilliant idea to eat in the Ikea café. Okay, I’ll admit, I love that place as much as the next consumerist moron. The gravad lax is excellent and the mousse is well worth the money. But it was Saturday, and it was crowded and I should have known that something was going to happen to me.
Still, I queued up like a champion until I reached the gravlax section and found that they had run out on the left side of the shelves. My brother and I pretty much live off the stuff when we go there so he held on to the trolley while I ran over to the other side to find a plate, dodging and weaving as I went.
Turns out it was the last plate left on that end and I had snatched it out of the grasp of a dozen reaching hands and was running back triumphantly with my booty when I suddenly stepped on a potato.
Yes, that’s right. A potato.
Some kid had left a teeny piece of potato on the floor from when it had fallen off her meatball platter and in my quest for the smoked salmon, I’d neglected to see it. And so, I stepped on that little corner of over-boiled starch and I slipped. A thousand other feet missed the potato, but me, it made contact with.
I mean, come on. I couldn’t even step on a macho piece of food like a “Sveedish meatbaaal” named Jamsunda or something, it was a fucking potato. And not even a big, fat, Harley Davidson-like Idaho potato but a small piece of spud from a company who’s idea of creativity is to name the kid’s play corner “Smaland”. Really.
So by now you already think what a loser I am and the rest of the story is pretty much inconsequential blah blah blah. But here’s the kicker. And I mean that literally. My left foot, slid on the potato and, get this, into my right heel where the corner of the toenail promptly split and turned a shade of purple to rival this here font. Blood spilled out and pooled in a brown mess underneath the skin. It hurt so much that all I could do was whine between my teeth while clinging tightly to my trembling plate of gravad lax and limping away with my tail between my legs
Did anyone gasp in horror? Did anyone stop to help?
Of course not. Instead, consumers stared at me, laughing inwardly at the classic memory I had given them by gliding forward on one foot while the parents pulled their kids closer to them and looked me over reproachfully as if to suggest that I might have pelted into and kicked one of their precious, runnning-around children in the process.
I wish to god I had.
It would have made that last plate of salmon taste so much sweeter.
So my week’s going okay! But do you want to hear about my weekend? The weekend of doom?? Because this is the weekend when I think I finally lost all the little dignity I’d managed to muster… and now that that’s gone, I can just admit defeat and go around telling everybody about it.
So a while ago, I wrote something in my diary about how Ikea is a really dangerous place to be. We’ve all been there right, that moment between hovering indecision and buying up just about the whole store. You go there thinking, “I’ll just look at all the pretty colours!” and then you come home with bookshelf, a rug, a clock, a painting and some brightly-coloured plastic thing that looks like it’s been ergonomically designed to crush garlic. Oh, and a couch.
I mean, these people really know what they’re doing!
Now though, it’s become deadly for a whole ‘nother reason.
As always, my family was weaving madly in and out of Ikea like in Supermarket Sweep.
(Have you ever seen that game show? It was just amazing… it was actually held in a supermarket and the participants spent about fifteen minutes playing price and product related games against each other. The last five minutes of the show was my favourite though – they took turns to run through the WHOLE supermarket just grabbing stuff and throwing it into a trolley and at the end, the one with the stuff in the trolley worth the most amount of money won and got to keep the cash! It was absolutely insane how they would go apeshit and clear stuff off the shelves with their arms… and the aisles were interspersed with big air-filled balloons shaped like product mascots that were worth hidden amounts to be revealed at the end of the run – the Jolly Green Giant was worth $500!
I used to get really excited during the Sweep segment when I was about ten or so, mainly because I was convinced that I would beat the shit out of every other competitor because I knew which things were worth the most. I mean obviously, meat, gourmet food and beauty products, right? And I had my strategy down pat, I would run straight to the gourmet stuff and shove the whole shelf into the trolley instead of daintily picking out items like most of the wimpy contestants did. The most frustrating thing would be when some idiot woman who’d obviously never shopped for anything for her family in her life would run straight to the canned aisle and throw tin after tin of peas into her cart while I would be jumping up and down and shouting, “Go for the turkey! GO FOR THE GODDAMN TURKEYARRRGGAARGHAAAARGGHHH!” Some months later, I tried to simulate my own version of the Sweep at my local Cold Storage… but that’s another tale for another time…)
ANYWAY. So we were running through Ikea right, and some dimbulb comes up with the brilliant idea to eat in the Ikea café. Okay, I’ll admit, I love that place as much as the next consumerist moron. The gravad lax is excellent and the mousse is well worth the money. But it was Saturday, and it was crowded and I should have known that something was going to happen to me.
Still, I queued up like a champion until I reached the gravlax section and found that they had run out on the left side of the shelves. My brother and I pretty much live off the stuff when we go there so he held on to the trolley while I ran over to the other side to find a plate, dodging and weaving as I went.
Turns out it was the last plate left on that end and I had snatched it out of the grasp of a dozen reaching hands and was running back triumphantly with my booty when I suddenly stepped on a potato.
Yes, that’s right. A potato.
Some kid had left a teeny piece of potato on the floor from when it had fallen off her meatball platter and in my quest for the smoked salmon, I’d neglected to see it. And so, I stepped on that little corner of over-boiled starch and I slipped. A thousand other feet missed the potato, but me, it made contact with.
I mean, come on. I couldn’t even step on a macho piece of food like a “Sveedish meatbaaal” named Jamsunda or something, it was a fucking potato. And not even a big, fat, Harley Davidson-like Idaho potato but a small piece of spud from a company who’s idea of creativity is to name the kid’s play corner “Smaland”. Really.
So by now you already think what a loser I am and the rest of the story is pretty much inconsequential blah blah blah. But here’s the kicker. And I mean that literally. My left foot, slid on the potato and, get this, into my right heel where the corner of the toenail promptly split and turned a shade of purple to rival this here font. Blood spilled out and pooled in a brown mess underneath the skin. It hurt so much that all I could do was whine between my teeth while clinging tightly to my trembling plate of gravad lax and limping away with my tail between my legs
Did anyone gasp in horror? Did anyone stop to help?
Of course not. Instead, consumers stared at me, laughing inwardly at the classic memory I had given them by gliding forward on one foot while the parents pulled their kids closer to them and looked me over reproachfully as if to suggest that I might have pelted into and kicked one of their precious, runnning-around children in the process.
I wish to god I had.
It would have made that last plate of salmon taste so much sweeter.
She said, she said at 9:06 pm
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