A Sneak Preview of IKEA 2010 Catalogue

Eric Banana is not a "waiter" - he hates to wait for just about anything. It goes without saying that when he found out that the IKEA 2010 catalogue will only be available on 1 August 2009, he started to get really restless. And when he gets restless, he starts to find ways to reduce that mounting internal dissonance - in this particular case, getting his hands on a copy of the darned IKEA 2010 catalogue will most certainly help...

... and help it did, even if it's the faraway U.S. edition, and a virtual copy at that. After all, it can't be all that different, can it? Hmmm...

Eric Banana has been a fan of IKEA catalogues since he was a kid. Somehow, flipping through pages of amazingly well-taken pictures of Swedish furniture is a therapeutic experience. It's something IKEA has mastered to perfection, never mind that the material and design of some of its furniture are suspect.

IKEA's online catalogue is also a joy to breeze through as it has no or minimal lag. The Straits Times Interactive should take a leaf from this technology. Reading ST Interactive via its E-Reader is a big pain in the donkey. By the time it finishes loading a page, Eric Banana could probably finish reading ten pages on the print edition.

After a quick flip of the U.S. IKEA 2010 catalogue, Eric Banana has ascertained that the IKEA furniture he is eyeing have not been discontinued. Yes, IKEA has its own way of detraining unsuspecting consumers' home furnishing plans by discontinuing certain product lines. And very often, some of the popular items will be temporarily out of stock or oversold. Interestingly, there is no way to make a reservation order for a particular piece of furniture. Business too big and too good liao ah?

On a side note, Eric Banana spotted something funny in one of the IKEA stores today... a gal was using the IKEA measuring tape to *erm* measure two of her vital statistics. Hmmm, maybe checking out the furniture wasn't really what she was there to do... She later turned to her male partner and screeched in an irritating voice, "YOU DON'T KNOW... YOU DON'T CARE!!" Well, Eric Banana doesn't know and is unlikely to care either, but he was half-tempted to make the connection between unidentified hard object and her cerebellum.