The Day That went wrong.

Back in 1st grade, I wrote a fictional story. Here it is, word for word, letter for letter:


The Day That went wrong.

One day My day was revulting! First I went to my car and got stuck behind a garbiggg truck The driver said: Hey Fred Theres another garbiggg can Theres to much garbiggg in the truck so we'll just have to dump it! are you shure? asked Fred. So lets do it and It did so I smelled like stale dog food!!! and so I WAS MIZERABLE



Yesterday was Part 2 (non-fiction) of "The Day That went wrong".

Things started out great. The landlord came on time (he brought his son for help), took everything out of the apartment that I didn't want, changed the lightbulb, took a bath. Wait, what? That's right. After the work was done, the landlord, an older (maybe in his 60s) Czech man made a washing hands motion and pointed toward the bathroom. I nodded and said, "Of course," thinking he wanted to wash his hands. I stood in the doorway talking to his son out in the hall, who I found out speaks Spanish and normally resides in the Dominican Republic! As we were chatting, I turned around to see my landlord in the bathroom (door open), without a shirt, leaned over the bathtub and washing. O...k.... so, ok, new experiences every day. He changed his shirt and they were on their way.

Next came the delivery guys. They were SO sweet - these poor guys had to carry my 20 or so heavy boxes up 3 flights of stairs. I offered to help carry some but they wouldn't let me. Right around the same time that the delivery guys got the boxes into the ground floor of my building, the guy from Ikea came to assemble things. That's right - one guy. For 3 pieces of furniture. And I had to be at work at 1pm to run a training.

So, up they went. Now, I was under the impression from some friends that the Ikea assembly person would have a partner, and also that he would work quickly and be done in about 2 hours. No such luck - at the end of 3 hours he only had the dresser built and nothing else. I started to panic, and got on IM to talk to someone at work.

After a lot of brainstorming, we decided that the best solution was for my boss, Alessio, to go to my apartment and work from there, and then I could go to the office to run the training as scheduled. So that's what we did. I left cookies and tea, gave him a run-down of everything, and got into work on time for the training.

The training went by, everything was okay, when Alessio called to say that the guys (around 12:45 a colleague arrived to help the guy) were done, and they were saying that I owed them another 1800Kc.

Now, the minimum to have Ikea come to your house and build for you is 1250 Kc. Then you calculate 9% of the price of the furniture THAT THEY ASSEMBLE. They were taking 9% of my total bill, which was insanely unfair - let's take it to another extreme and assume that I bought 100,000Kc worth of stuff, and I only have one thing to assemble. Do I pay 9% of my entire bill? No - that would be ridiculous. So, I argued and I put Elena on the phone with them, who speaks Czech.

After a lot of back-and-forth, she got it sorted out and we figure out that I, in fact, did not owe them anything more than what I already paid.

Then, I found out that the bed was missing a piece and I had to go back to Ikea. I bolted out of work and got there as quickly as possible. I was going to just buy that, but I figured while I was there, I should get what I need, so I got a pretty tablecloth for my kitchen table, a shower curtain liner, and a picture frame for my picture of my grandmother, in addition to the big metal pole that I needed for my bed. I got home on the metro, lugged the thing around managing not to hit anyone in the head with it, put it together, and let my eyes glaze over with wonder:

I had a bed. A complete and functional bed.

So while the day was a huge mess, it had a happy ending. Boy did I sleep well. :)