The Simple Things In Life

It is always the simple things, isn’t it? The really simple, obvious, little things that should be so easy to do that become fricking sagas. Those tiny jobs that should take five minutes but end up taking hours, and leave you questioning not only why you bothered even trying in the first place.

To give you an example of what I am banging on about, yesterday my girlfriend and I tried to buy a chair. Now this, you would think, should be a really easy thing to do. After all, chairs have been around for centuries. There are no shortage of shops in London that sell chairs. How difficult could it be?

And to compound the apparent ease, yesterday The Observer was offering a voucher that got you money off anything bought at Habitat. Of course this meant that you could have to buy The Observer, but you got money off stuff and you didn’t have to read the fucking newspaper. So, how cool was this scenario? We would be able to pop into Habitat, on a quiet Sunday, and buy a chair on the cheap. As one of my Welsh friends would say, "Happy Days!"

Which it was, until we made the fatal mistake of actually involving shop assistants.

We found a decent enough looking chair, on display in the store, and went to the sales desk to see if we could buy the chair. The shop assistant was helpful enough, in that "I’m a Sunday worker, I really couldn’t give a fuck" kind of way. And he went to the warehouse to see if they had the chair in stock.

A minute passed. Then five minutes passed. Then ten minutes. Finally, after a quarter of an hour of our lives had disappeared into oblivion, our shop assistant reappeared.

"Sorry, we haven’t got that one in stock."

We’d guessed that by the fact that he came back from the warehouse empty handed.

"We do have the plastic version in the warehouse if you would like to buy that," he said, somewhat grudgingly.

Now, the phrase "plastic version" fills me with vision of uncomfortable seats in crappy classrooms, but since we were in the store it was worth taking a look. So, not unreasonably, my girlfriend asked

"Can we see the plastic version then, please?"

The shop assistant looked genuinely staggered that anyone would ask to see a product before they bought it. It took him a clear minute to recover himself, and he left for the warehouse still looking utterly incredulous at what he had just been asked.

Another 15 minutes went by, and again he returned, this time with a white chair in two parts. He put the main part of the chair on the counter, and somewhat excitedly, removed the polythene so we could see the plastic completely. He looked so expectantly at us that I honestly feel he thought that we would fall instantly in love with that chair, and buy it from him eagerly.

Of course, it was a plastic chair, it wasn’t what we wanted, it looked uncomfortable and the chair we actually wanted was on display less than 50 metres from where we stood.

"Is there any chance," I asked, without much hope, "Of us buying the display model?"

The shop assistant thinned his lips, and the expression that crossed his face would suggest that I had dissed his mother rather than asking a perfectly reasonable question.

"Oh," he said, shaking his head like an oncologist giving a patient the worst possible news, "Oh, I’m not sure about that. Not sure about that at all. I’ll have to check with my manager. And two of them are upstairs."

It was difficult to understand why on earth he thought we would care about the location of his managers, or indeed why it would make a blind bit of fucking difference to him contacting said managers. However, it clearly meant something, as our assistant stood stock still, not making any move towards the ‘phone.

"Well, could you check for us please?" asked my girlfriend.

Our shop assistant raised one eyebrow, as if considering this no doubt radical proposal. Then he nodded, and picked up the phone.

"I’ll try to get hold of the manager who’s one this floor," he said, peering at us like he was doing us a massive favour and wondering what he could get from us in return.

There then followed a whispered conversation over the phone, but we knew by the thinning of his lips and the slightly wary look he gave us halfway through the call that things weren’t about to go our way.

And, when he had put the receiver down, he confirmed it.

"Sorry, we can’t sell display stock."

"Ok, let’s just go," my girlfriend said, with a wonderful sense of weariness.

"Does it have a reduced sticker on?" The shop assistant asked.

"I don’t think so," my girlfriend answered, whilst I wondered how on earth this silly little man expected us to remember to remember exactly what tags and stickers the furniture in his shop had on it.

He sighed, almost sadly.

"That’s a shame. Sometimes we can sell reduced display stock, but…"

At this point, a supervisor who had been buzzing about not achieving a great deal in the way that only retail supervisors can manage, decided to insert herself into the conversation.

"What are these people looking for?" she asked the shop assistant, somehow managing to make "these people" sound like "those bastards."

The shop assistant explained the situation.

"Oh, well, have you told them the price of the chair? It is £69. Let’s work it out with the discount."

The irony is that the chair we wanted was £79. And the plastic one was £49. We knew this because during the time we had been waiting for the shop assistant to achieve the square root of fuck all, we had looked up all the prices in the catalogue.

"We don’t want to know the prices, we know them already," said my girlfriend, getting increasingly irate. However the supervisor was not to be deterred, and moments later told us the prices we already knew.

"Let’s just go," said my girlfriend, but I was ready to give it just one last go.

"Look, all we want to do is buy this one chair," I began.

The shop assistant nodded his understanding.

"And that chair is over there." I pointed to the chair on the shop floor.

The shop assistant shrugged.

"So the easiest thing in the world would be to buy that chair, over there."

The shop assistant shrugged again. This time helplessly.

"We aren’t going to be able to buy that chair from this shop, are we?"

The supervisor with all the social skills of an angry puff adder piped up again.

"Well, if they want the chair, they either need to order it," she said to the shop assistant, as clearly we weren’t worth talking to directly. "They can pick it up from the store or get it delivered to their home."

Perhaps we should have pointed out that we had already wasted close on 45 minutes in the store, so waiting for longer for the chair would have been insulting. Perhaps we could have pointed out that we would have had to have wasted further time in waiting for the chair to be delivered, or coming back to the store to pick it up. Or perhaps we should have pointed out once again that the chair was less than 50 metres away from us.

But it was time to cut our losses, and move in with our lives.

My girlfriend said again "Let’s go." I nodded, and we left the bemused shop assistant to listen to his supervisor bang on about prices.

We went to buy a chair. We found the chair we wanted. It was in the shop. And it is still in the shop. And will be there, I reckon, for the foreseeable future.

*Sighs*