I want to state for the record that I do not have a problem with furniture. I have a problem with furniture that comes in a flat box with a cartoon man on the cover who looks unreasonably happy about the seventeen hours of suffering he is about to endure. That man is lying to you. That man has never assembled a KALLAX in his life. That man is a propaganda tool of the Swedish furniture-industrial complex and I will not be gaslit by him.

The day began innocently enough. VexNull had mentioned, in passing, during a group call about something completely unrelated, that her apartment "needed a bookshelf." This is a normal thing for a normal person to say. Normal people hear this and think: "Okay, she'll go buy a bookshelf." Normal people do not hear this and think: "I should organize a group expedition to IKEA on a Saturday morning because it'll be fun and also I saw online that they have those cinnamon rolls and I haven't eaten yet."

I am not normal people. This has been established.

The crew assembled at 10 AM in the parking lot of the IKEA in [REDACTED], which is a forty-five minute drive from where any of us actually live but was the only location that had the specific BILLY bookshelf in birch veneer that VexNull wanted. VexNull had researched this. VexNull had checked inventory levels across three stores. VexNull approaches bookshelf acquisition with the same methodical intensity she applies to penetration testing. This should have been my first warning.

Present: myself, VexNull, n1ghtsh1ft (who had been awake since 3 AM and was vibrating at a frequency visible to the human eye), CryptK (who does not like crowds, does not like stores, does not like Sweden, and had come anyway because VexNull asked him), and gh0stwire, who had volunteered his truck for the bookshelf transport and was already regretting this because n1ghtsh1ft had spilled half a Monster Energy on the passenger seat during the drive.

SsSnake was not present. SsSnake does not go to IKEA. SsSnake once said, and I quote, "I would rather configure a Cisco ASA via serial cable in a burning building than navigate the IKEA showroom floor." SsSnake has priorities and they do not include meatballs.

We entered the store. Immediately, the one-way path system claimed us. If you've never been to IKEA, understand: you cannot simply walk to the bookshelf section. You must first pass through living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, a small existential crisis about whether your life would be measurably better if you owned a HEMNES dresser, a children's section where someone's kid is screaming at a pitch that could strip paint, and a section dedicated entirely to small boxes. There are so many small boxes. Why does IKEA have so many small boxes. What are people storing in all of these boxes. These are questions I began asking aloud approximately twelve minutes into the journey, at which point CryptK told me to "stop narrating" and VexNull threatened to leave me in the as-is section.

n1ghtsh1ft disappeared. This happened between the kitchen displays and the office section. One moment he was there, studying a desk lamp with the intensity of a man who has just discovered fire. The next moment: gone. His phone went to voicemail. We did not find him for two hours.

This is important later.

We reached the bookshelf section. VexNull located the BILLY. She examined it with a critical eye. She measured it with a tape measure she had brought from home. She checked the weight rating. She verified the finish against a color swatch she had printed from the website. She turned to us and said: "This is the one."

CryptK said: "Great. Can we leave now."

We could not leave now, because gh0stwire had spotted a kitchen island that he claimed would "completely transform" his apartment, and d4rkfl0w — that's me — had made the catastrophic decision to sit in a POÄNG chair, which if you haven't experienced one, is essentially a device engineered by Swedish scientists to make you never want to stand up again. I sat in that chair and something inside me changed. I became a person who owns a POÄNG chair. The transition was instantaneous and irreversible.

"I'm getting the chair," I announced.

"You live in a studio apartment," VexNull said. "Your apartment is ninety percent monitors."

"I'm getting the chair and I'm putting it between the monitors."

"That is the saddest thing I've ever heard."

"You don't understand comfort, Vex. You code standing up."

"Because sitting is a vulnerability."

This argument continued through the marketplace section, where I also acquired: a set of tealight candles (24-pack, unscented), a cheese grater shaped like a small tower, two wooden spoons that I absolutely did not need, a plant pot that I do not have a plant for, a bag of those chocolate oat balls they put near the checkout specifically to prey on people in my emotional state, and a LACK side table, which costs nine dollars and is made of what I can only describe as furniture-flavored cardboard.

CryptK bought nothing. CryptK walked through the entire marketplace with his hands clasped behind his back like a museum patron who has been forced to visit a gallery of art he considers beneath him. At one point he picked up a garlic press, examined it, said "no," and put it down. That was the extent of CryptK's IKEA shopping experience.

gh0stwire's kitchen island situation had escalated. He was now on the phone with someone — we later learned it was his landlord — asking if the apartment's floor could "support a significant additional load." The landlord apparently asked how significant, and gh0stwire said "about three hundred pounds of kitchen island," and there was a long silence during which, I imagine, the landlord reconsidered every decision that had led to gh0stwire being his tenant.

We proceeded to the self-serve warehouse to collect the flat-pack boxes. The BILLY bookshelf was in aisle 24, bin 08. The POÄNG chair was in aisle 31, bin 15. gh0stwire's kitchen island, which he had decided to purchase despite the landlord's silence, was in aisle 42 and required a flatbed cart.

And that's when we found n1ghtsh1ft.

n1ghtsh1ft was in the model room section. Not the showroom — the model rooms. The little boxed-in displays that show you how a 350-square-foot apartment can look "livable" if you own nothing and have the emotional range of a catalog photograph. n1ghtsh1ft had, at some point during his two-hour disappearance, entered one of these model rooms, sat down at the model desk, opened his actual laptop (which he carries everywhere, always, even to IKEA), connected to the store Wi-Fi, and begun working.

He had been sitting in a fake apartment, on fake furniture, in the middle of a furniture store, doing real work, for two hours. A family of four had walked through the model room while he was in it. They had assumed he was part of the display. Their child had waved at him. He had waved back without looking up from his screen.

"I found a power outlet behind the fake nightstand," he said, by way of explanation. "The desk is actually pretty comfortable."

"We thought you were dead," I said.

"I uploaded three commits."

"To what?"

"A project."

"From inside an IKEA display apartment."

"The Wi-Fi is better here than at my actual apartment."

This statement was met with a silence that contained more emotions than I knew five people could feel simultaneously.

The assembly phase happened at VexNull's apartment. I will abbreviate this section because the full account would require a separate text file, a therapist's notes, and possibly testimony from VexNull's downstairs neighbor who at one point came upstairs to ask if everything was okay because "it sounded like someone was building something and also possibly crying."

The key facts are these:

1. The BILLY bookshelf has 34 individual pieces. The instructions have 18 steps. Step 14 requires you to have not made a mistake in Step 6. We discovered this at Step 14.

2. CryptK, who had been sitting in a corner reading a book on his phone and contributing nothing, looked at the partially assembled bookshelf and said, "That's wrong." He was correct. He had known it was wrong since Step 6. When asked why he hadn't said anything, he said, "I assumed you were doing it intentionally." CryptK's faith in our competence is a void that light cannot escape.

3. My POÄNG chair required no assembly. It came in two pieces. You snap them together. This took fourteen seconds. I sat in it and watched everyone else suffer. It was the best fourteen seconds of the day and the chair remains, to this day, the greatest purchase I have ever made.

4. gh0stwire's kitchen island remains in the box. In his truck. Where it has been for three months. He says he's "going to get around to it." The box is slowly becoming a permanent feature of the truck bed. Plants may begin growing around it. It will fossilize. Archaeologists will find it in a thousand years and wonder what ancient ritual it was part of.

5. n1ghtsh1ft went back to IKEA the following Tuesday. He sat in the same model room. He brought a portable monitor this time. An employee asked him if he worked there. He said no. The employee said he couldn't just sit in the display rooms. n1ghtsh1ft pointed out that the desk was listed at $149 and said, "I'm test-driving it." The employee did not know what to do with this information and walked away. n1ghtsh1ft stayed for four more hours.

He now owns the desk. He says it's the best desk he's ever had. He found out the model number by looking at the tag on the bottom of the display model while lying on the fake floor of the fake apartment. A child stepped over him while he was doing this.

IKEA has not banned any of us. This feels like an oversight.