Ikea

On Sunday I helped out the world's richest man. No, nothing to do with Microsoft - due to currency fluctuations that title is no longer held by Billy Gates. Instead Ingvar Kamprad, the guy who founded Ikea, is number one.

My contribution to his vast wealth was the profit he made in selling me our new coffee table, improbably named Bankesta. I think Ikea must have to hire a team of people just to make up names for all it's stuff. Every little thing they sell has its own name and not "Blue Plastic Jug" but something like Kringald (colour blue). They do a good job of finding so many names that sound kind of Scandanavian and kind of right but don't actually mean anything.

Anyhow after an hour or so playing with screw drivers I had assembled our Bankesta. It replaces a coffee table that was built for us as a house warming gift five years ago. It was a great table but it didn't have two key attributes that the Bankesta has. Storage (the Bankesta has two big boxes underneath) and rounded corners. The old table had sharp pointy corners that were great for jabbing kids and adult alike. We tried putting corner protectors on them (purchased from Ikea if I recall correctly) but due to the beveled edge they kept falling off.

It has occurred to me that another reason why Ingvar may have toppled Billy from top spot was that if I wanted to upgrade my home pc to a newer version of windows I wouldn't spend an hour or so with screw drivers getting a finished product. Instead I'd spend fours hours trying to upgrade encountering one small glitch after the next only to end up with a system that runs slower than the one I had (unless I spent more money on hardware of course - that old vicious circle).

And that is why I still run Windows 98 on my home PC.