Stranded at Robinson Centre

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. The activity of the day. Each disaster has its starting ground, so does this one: Sacrificing half of your Thursday for a Swedish furniture chain was not primarily caused by being stuck in traffic at 5.30 pm. It was actually a damaged couch that you had bought past Sunday. It is not a good idea to have that kind of furniture when you are planning on selling it next summer. Even without an MBA degree you would know that. Too bad that you noticed the defect after getting back from the store. An American would have probably sued the company right away.

And so you decided to go back to Ikea together with your roommate, to demand our rights as paying customers and our right to undamaged consumption goods. But rush hour in Pittsburgh plus a car accident on I-279 equals a total standstill on the highway. The equation does not solve otherwise, despite all math refresher workshops past week. Your mood hits its first low of the day. Playing an ABBA CD brings some relief, making your roommate sing and clap on the useless steering wheel in the middle of the traffic jam. But only for a little while.
After you finally arrived at Ikea, the next setback. They don’t have a substitute. At least not right away. What is cost-saving for the company is time-consuming for you as the consumer: The simultaneous usage of the building as warehouse for stocks and as sales floor. They cannot get the couch down from the high shelves with the fork lifter until the store is closed and all customers have left. Is that rule the result of a lawsuit?
The alternative to additional two hours of waiting would be coming back on the weekend. But within the next days, ten thousands of students will rush back to college and thus to Ikea, too. What the holiday season is for most stores – that is “Back to college” for Ikea.

The prospect of dull waiting in the shopping district “Robinson Centre” or fighting over the last “Solsta” couch with Undergrads – the choice between plague or cholera. But the price is already too high after the traffic jam. Returning home without the couch would be a shame, a defeat. Didn’t Bush warn against an early withdrawal from Iraq drawing a parallel to Vietnam?
And so play Robinson Crusoe for a few hours. Hotdogs and frozen yogurt appease your stomach. At Circuit City next door you ask the service guy a gazillion questions about external hard drives and software. Looking through the DVDs and CDs on display kill additional time. A longer talk via cell phone complete the modern quadrathlon.

Instead of the of the afternoon haze, the moon has risen above Pittsburgh. But romantic feelings do not arise.
At 9.20 pm, finally: You receive your new, this time undamaged sofa. But we hallooed before we got out of the woods. The interstate, some sort of sadistic protean or quick-change artist. Another car accident plus inflowing college students turn the highway into a lethargic parking lot. The motionless red rear lights look like a sea of red candles in a Catholic cemetery, you think. But in this sad affair, the only one who is moribund is the climate. Thanks to 20 miles per gallon SUVs.