Last weekend I took a trip to Ikea in Dallas to pick out my kitchen cabinets. I drove my car assuming that I wouldn’t be bringing the whole kitchen back with me, but ordering and going back to get it in a truck. The Ikea sales guy who helped me said “dude we have all that stuff in stock… take it home today”. I told him I was in a car, and he was very confident it would all fit. I liked the idea, but deep down I knew he was full of crap, so I said “okay, I’ll try to do it all today and save a 3.5 hour trip both ways in a gas guzzler”.

While I was going through buying all the pieces of my kitchen. I got this weird feeling about the two guys across from me at the other design station. What are two guys doing at Ikea? “Where are you guys from?”, “Tulsa”, “Is that Gary?”, “OH HEY Alex!!!….bla bla bla”. Gary is a person I have met only once, but is friend of a lot of my friends, and he is a person that even if you’ve only met him once, he is hard to miss. So another small world story, and I quickly forgot about seeing Tulsans, and continued my rigorous decision making processes.

I went down stairs to pick up all my stuff after about 3-4 hours of just trying to buy all these cabinets and things, and saw the cart with my number. I noticed the big 88″x24″ pieces were missing. I was looking for those, because I knew they would be the biggest challenge. The guy told me to hold my horses, and this wasn’t all my stuff. An hour later they had brought ALL my stuff out… Not a single cart but 4 HUGE carts, each one bigger than the last, and not shopping basket carts, but Lowes style lumber carts.

The next hour was spent in the most difficult Tetris match ever. I didn’t win, but for a very short time I thought I might pull it off. I actually managed to fit the 88″x24″ pieces into my little car!

I was going to have to come back the next day and get the rest, so I pushed my last cart back inside, but as I went in Gary and his friend were coming out. “what are you guys driving?”, “A truck”. That was it, my solution, and being the very nice people they were, they took back the rest of my stuff, even the KITCHEN SINK (sorry for the lame joke, but it’s true).