For those unfamiliar with the PnP Tech Center, it's a big incubation space made up of hundreds of early stage start ups. What's nice about this place is that they provide you with all the furniture and most of the network/phone capabilities, and you just need to focus on building your product.
Lately, our team has gotten bigger and louder (thanks to all the epic nerf gun battles that we have there), and we decided that we should get our own space so that we will have room to grow and that we will not disturb any other companies. What this also means is that we now have to buy all kinds of new furniture for the new office.
Dennis, Kevin and I stopped by IKEA on Monday to pick out the furniture. It started out pretty nice as the place was relatively quiet on a weekday, and we were taking our time trying out different couches, desks, etc. Midway through, fatigue sat in and we realized we were trapped by IKEA's brilliant floor plan design, forcing us to walk around and around the god-damnned building. To top it off, us three had to load up 6 big carts with heavy pieces of furniture.
We were all pretty tired near the end, and we saw from far away that they were selling hot dogs and cinnabons. We were starving, and we wanted to eat badly. But we were afraid someone would take away our cart if we just abandoned it in the aisle. So we went up to one of the guys working there:
Dennis: "Hi. How can we leave our carts here without someone taking them away from us?"
Ikea guy: "Oh yeah. Just park them over in that area to the left and I will give you a sign that says "I'm still shopping" and you can put it in your cart."
What a brilliant idea. They really have all these scenarios thought through for the customers.
It must have been my first time eating at IKEA in ages: I'd forgotten how cheap the food is there. Hot dogs were $0.50 each. Or you can get 2 hot dogs, chips, and a soft drink for $2.50. You also get a box full of 6 cinnabons for $4. We went ahead and bought 6 cinnabons and 4 hot dogs. By the time we're done eating, we still have 3 extra cinnabons sitting on the table.
Dennis: "Should we just toss it?"
Kevin: "That'd be such a waste. Let's bring them back to work."
Dennis: "But we've got 6 cart full of stuff with us. Let's just leave it on the table and see if anyone will just take it."
Me: "Wait. If they have a 'I'm still shopping sign', naturally shouldn't they also have a 'I'm still eating' sign?"
It ended up taking us four hours at IKEA to get everything that we needed. I'm so not going there again for the next few years.
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