Pick-A-Day

March 2024
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Don’t Believe

It’s a good thing that I opted against getting my Ikea bed delivered Thursday.

I had two specific activities to accomplish Thursday—one was somewhat important, legally speaking, and I got chastised, in German, because I should have done it two months ago (one must follow the rules in Germany), and the other was a hair cut that I scheduled two months ago, before I left, to ensure my favorite guy was there to cut my hair.

It was good I decided to put the delivery off until Friday because Ikea’s delivery service in Erfurt is a gigantic wildcard. Once you pick the day, they promise to deliver your stuff between 07 and 18; a gigantic ten hour window. I was told they would call me about an hour before delivery so that I could be home.

Foolishly I gave them my landline digits, not my mobile number, so I was trapped at home.

However, being the observant fellow that I am, I noticed that the receipt indicated that the estimated delivery time would be available on the Internets the night before. According to the schedule I looked at yesterday, I was assigned a two hour window between 12.15 and 14.15.

Good thing I didn’t believe it: I stayed home this morning working on a project when my phone rang. It was my T-Net Voicemail box calling to tell me that a message had been left while I was in the shower. Four old, non-messages, later I finally listened to today’s message left at 08.15. Somebody either had the wrong number or the delivery service personnel had called to tell me something—however the guy was mumbling and I could only make one word out, “zwischen”, which means “between”. Listening to the message a second time didn’t help my understanding: I think the guy was talking with his mouth full.

A few minutes later, at 09.15, the doorbell rang: Malm was in the house.

So much for the assigned delivery time, and boy am I glad I believe it.

I do have another rant about time-zones! The project I was working on this morning was a deadline demon headache. It doesn’t matter why the project was urgent (other than to say it wasn’t my fault), but I received a threatening email from somebody yesterday telling me that the deadline was FIVE PM TOMORROW.

“Gee, thanks,” I thought to myself, “But what fucking time zone are you talking about?! Are you in Japan, meaning that I have to finish it tonight since I’ll probably still be in bed at 5pm, tomorrow, Japanese time; or is that 5pm in California, meaning that I can put it off until after dinner tomorrow night?”

It’s not like I could tell from looking at company information: they have offices around the world and although I suspected it was the British office, it’s quite reasonable, considering the project, that it would have been the US offices or even ones in India.

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