Frööglė bėrrĭeŝ and wordless assembly instructions

Kir and I took a trip to Ikea a couple of weekends ago and got a bunch of stuff. I spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon assembling various pieces of furniture - following the assembly instructions very carefully. For those of you who don't know what Ikea is, let me give you a quick description. This place has just about anything you'd need to furnish a home/office/space station. All of the furniture is designed to ship easily, assemble with little effort or mechanical skills and look - well, look okay. I think the stuff we got looks really good, but then they have stuff like this. Notice it's named Göönk. Now I know I shouldn't make fun of weird words, especially with a company called Gitgan, but this is different. Almost everything has those goofy little accent marks in the name. (Apparently those "dot dot" marks are called umlaut's pronounced oohm-louts.) For instance - Kirsten and I bought 2 Poäng chairs and a Kaxås TV unit. That's just two items, everything has these weird foreign or goofy sounding names. My favorite though - their line of barware is called Groggy. If you've never made a purchase from Ikea that you have to assemble you haven't experienced life yet. Ikea assembly instructions prove that using words to communicate is totally overrated. For example - here is an illustration from the Kaxås assembly book. Looks fairly simple right - and you know what? It is. I put together 4 pieces of furniture in under an hour. The thing that weirds me out though is - they don't use words - but apparently the different pieces that go into assembling your furniture can think. Look at that illustration again. Those screws are thinking (apparently at 4x magnification), "Let's attach the legs of this Kaxås to the bottom of the unit." It made me wonder, what else could they be thinking. What if they had higher aspirations for their lives - like becoming surgical technicians...

... or a future in the entertainment industry.

Dream away part# 100362, and may you find contentment in serving your purpose. The other thing about Ikea that is weird is that they have a restaurant inside the store and since Ikea is based in Sweden, they sell Swedish meatballs and other foods that are much harder to pronounce. They sell Lingon Berry juice - I think it tastes great. But I always pronounced it "Lig-unn" until my wife pointed out that there is another "n" in there. So I've renamed them - I figure if they can call a table a Björkudden I can call these things Frööglė bėrrĭeŝ, the nice part about my word is that all those goofy accent marks don't mean anything.