VIDEO IS GRAPHIC. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED
KUALA LUMPUR: The sight of bare wood at an Ikea store would not ordinarily raise eyebrows, but unsuspecting shoppers at an outlet in Hong Kong nearly choked on their foot-long sausages recently, when a large display screen began playing a hardcore pornographic flick (which, to add insult to injury, wasn’t even Swedish).
The cock-up occurred at Ikea’s Park Lane Shopping Mall outlet in Causeway Bay at 12.45pm on Tuesday, when the store was crawling with New Year’s Day customers shamelessly sneaking naps on the sectional sofas, or satanically contemplating making use of the display toilets.
According to the Asia News Network, the errant display screen was the most prominent of the store’s 25 giant monitors, as it stands proudly erect at the outlet’s entrance (or exit, depending on your proclivities), and was the only one to so badly misbehave.
The jaw-dropping/breaking video, which played for several minutes – some estimate as long as 15 minutes – featured a lone Asian man, err… polishing his own (Ikea door)knob. More distressingly, the camera kept zooming in on his… Swedish meatballs and foot-long sausage.
(As customers began noticing that they were seeing a screw of a kind completely unrelated to furniture, I wonder if they felt that Ikea was pushing its “D.I.Y. assembly” concept a little too far…)
According to The Mirror, an appalled customer who wanted only to be known as “Chan” (I guess he couldn’t come up with a good porn star name) called the attention of several employees to the video “after watching it for three minutes.” (Indeed. Three minutes is long enough for a shag… carpet to be located at Ikea).
Apple Daily reported that Chan was initially ignored by employees (who probably thought he was hunting for accessories for his S&M room in the wrong store), before one female staff member noticed the “wardrobe” malfunction causing an orgy of tooth-gnashing at the front of the shop.
But instead of taking a heavy floor lamp to the display screen and shattering it to kingdom come, the woman, armed with a small roll of drawer lining paper (yes), limply attempted to cover the much larger monitor with the efficacy of someone taking part in the Bird Box challenge. In other words, the dangly bits were still dangling.
After several more minutes of haplessness, fretting and indecision, a towering intellect among the staff, with a shining Ikea lightbulb atop his head, came up with the idea of pulling the display screen’s plug (not THAT kind of plug).
As the sawdust settled, an Ikea spokesman issued an apology for the oopsie later in the day, saying that the company is investigating the incident. No working explanation was provided for the guffaw-worthy gaffe, but some have speculated that a prankster may have hacked the store’s system as a New Year’s joke.
Despite the damage caused to the eyesight of numerous children on Tuesday, something good came out of the mishap – Ikea’s creation of a new sub-genre of film I shall henceforth refer to as “porn-iture”.