The bookshelf was supposed to take twenty minutes to assemble. This was printed on the box, in confident letters, right next to a smiling illustrated man holding a single hex key like it was the only tool a person could ever need. Three hours later, I had a bookshelf that leaned to the left with the quiet, patient menace of a tower that knew exactly what it was doing and was simply biding its time.
Anna took one look at it and said, very kindly, “It’s giving haunted.”
I decided to return it. This seemed like a reasonable plan. I did not yet understand that I was entering a system designed by people who had never once, in their lives, wanted to actually give a refund.
At the store, I was told returns required the original receipt. I had the receipt, on my phone, in an email, which the woman at the counter looked at with the deep suspicion of someone being shown a ransom note. “We need a printed copy,” she said. I asked where I might print it. She gestured, vaguely, toward the exit, as though printers existed somewhere out there in the wild, grazing.
I drove to a print shop. I printed the receipt. I drove back. The same woman looked at the new printed receipt and informed me that the item itself now needed to be inspected by “the furniture specialist,” who was at lunch, and would be back “sometime.” I asked if there was a way to know when sometime was. She said sometime was sometime.
I sat in the furniture section for fifty five minutes. I want to be clear that I was not given a chair. I sat on a display sofa that had a sign on it reading “Please Do Not Sit,” which felt, by that point in the day, like a personal challenge rather than an instruction.
The furniture specialist eventually arrived, inspected my bookshelf with the focus of a man defusing a bomb, and declared that one of the shelf pegs was, in his professional opinion, “slightly bent,” and that this might have been caused by “user error during assembly,” which is corporate for “I don’t believe you.”
I asked him, as calmly as a man can ask anything after sitting on a forbidden sofa for nearly an hour, whether a slightly bent peg was truly grounds for denying a return on a bookshelf that leaned like it was trying to escape through the wall. He looked at the bookshelf again. He looked at me. Something in him seemed to soften, the way a person softens when they remember they, too, are just a guy, trying to get through a shift.
“I’ll approve it,” he said, “but you didn’t hear it from me.” I told him I hadn’t heard anything from anyone all day, which felt true in more ways than one.
The refund took nine to eleven business days to appear, according to the receipt, the new one, the printed one, which I now keep in a folder labeled “Evidence,” because some part of me suspects I will need it again someday, for something, somewhere, in a different store, against a different bookshelf.
Anna asked if I’d learned anything. I told her I’d learned that “twenty minutes” on a box is not a measurement of time, it’s a dare. She said I should build the next one together, as a team. I said the team had already lost once, and I wasn’t sure our record could take another loss like that.
We bought a bookshelf that was already built. It cost more. It has never once leaned in any direction. I look at it sometimes, standing there, perfectly upright, and I think about the furniture specialist, wherever he is, hopefully on a real lunch this time.
