11 Mar 2005
HAD Dante been alive to today, he would have added another level of Hell to his masterpiece. And its name would have been Ikea.
And just as with Hell, even though men and women know the perils and pitfalls that lie in wait, they still commit the cardinal sin of getting in the Volvo and popping along to the Scandinavian superstore for some flatpacked bad karma.
Ikea is worse than the lowest pit of Hell. What’s more, it is a bastion of male chauvinism. And the Prime Minister of Norway wants it to end.
The Times says that Kjell Magne Bondevik looked at the instruction manual on his Cabinet’s new conference table-cum-children’s bunk beds, and screamed: “This just isn’t good enough.”
No, not the fact the instructions were impossible to follow, nor that they were written in a language that had yet to be invented, but because it was men and only men in the pictures.
Why should this be? There was to his mind “no justification” for only showing men assembling furniture in Ikea’s instruction booklets.
The store says that there are women in assembly instructions, but they are few and far between and only serve to be screamed at while the menfolk get the good jobs, like hammering in nails.
And then, when the nails fail to go in properly, the cowed women look on while their man uses said hammer to shatter the nest of incidental tables into a million shards of laminate and chipboard.
Anorak
I can imagine their faces when they go "whaaat? My mum never does that" 
I wouldn't touch a vacuum cleaner with a stick, I hate the damn thing. Thank god my hubbie isn't that picky on cleaningdevices. Also if it was my responsibility to clean up the kitchen every night... Not a pretty sight. But I do the loundry and cooking so I call it a tie.