The art of not being one with the universe

Place: IKEA. Actors: Me, lots of other squanderers, and the IKEA employees. I have ordered a bed and a big bookshelf for home delivery, and I have a yellow bag with the regular swag. It’s twenty minutes to closing time, I’m in the big storage hall just before the registers. I’ve picked up a box containing a nifty (and heavy!) folding table (last one in the store! Ha!), and I decide to leave my cart for a few minutes, to just dash across the hall a couple of times to see if I can find a few last, light items I want. Should be much faster than pushing the heavy (and therefore inertia-laden) cart around the tables and other people in the hall, at least if not crashing into things and people is a point. Which it is. So. I go about my search. I don’t find the shelf I seek, so I go to the computer terminal to see where it is. When it gets around to waking from its slumber and helping me (well, sort of helping. Somebody™ fucked up the name substring search when they programmed the thing), I venture boldly forth, at last, to seek my fortune. Which I don’t find, ’cause it’s sold out. No matter. Mission failed. Return to cart. Which I do, ‘xcept it’s not there.

Fifteen minutes to closing time. I try to retrace my step backwards to the last point where I know for absolutely certain I had the cart. No fish. Redo. No fish. Panic mode: Run up and down the hall, peering along every rack, looking for a cart laden like mine. Still no fish. Panic panic mode mode: Run along the shelves where I know for absolutely certain I not only had the cart, but also left with it, all the while looking for my cart. Ten minutes to closing time. As I venture back to where I picked up the table, where I definitely have not been back with the cart, I notice that a yellow bag next to a near-empty cart that’s definitely not mine looks remarkably like the one I… I beg your pardon?

So. Somebody else also wanted that table, found the shelf empty, and then spotted an abandoned cart with the coveted table on, and saw fit to… rearrange the universe slightly, right? Right. No. Wrong. Because, being screwed over the table anyway so that it doesn’t really matter if I perform another minor act of irrationality, I walk the six meters to the shelf 11-39, where I picked up the table. Which is where the table is.

Five minutes to closing time.

Bloody Swedes. Thank you, yellowshirts. Here I am, giving you nearly all the money I have in return for nothing more than a bed and a pile of processed woodpulp. I didn’t order “piss off customer”, even though it was on sale.