Because we apparently angered the furniture gods, Dave and I are still having problems with our living room. In this case, it’s a problem with our lamps. More on that in a minute.

I promised an update on the state of the living room. Here it is:

When we bought our couch and chair (the one with the black cat on it), we realized that they needed to be separated by lots of space. It looked too cramped with everything on one side of our small room. The coffee table is now scratched beyond recognition because of the trouble-making cat you see on the couch, so now it serves as our TV stand.

And yes, that’s a teddy bear sitting next to him. It belongs to the third cat, Stinky (not pictured). Yeah, my cats have favorite stuffed animals. Got a problem with that?

With the set now split apart, we needed something to bridge the canyon in the middle of the room, so we threw down a rug and pulled the red chair in from another room.

Yes, we know it looks like we were inebriated when we set it up like this, but it fits our style and we don’t mind that the colors don’t match. We’re choosing to call this look drunken feng shui eclectic.

So what’s up with the lamps? Long story. It involves a set of brass balls.

We bought two lamps (you see only one here) from a place about 20 miles from home. It was a pain in the butt to drive there, but we’d spent weeks on an unsuccessful hunt for a specific kind of brass lamp, and we got it on good authority that this place would have what we wanted.

Turns out they had tons of brass lamps in their showroom, but we ultimately went with a catalog order because it offered brass lamps with pull chains instead of on/off knobs. We insisted on pull chains with brass balls hanging from them. But ordering from a catalog meant a six week wait.

Six weeks finally came and Dave picked up the lamps and brought them home. We ordered two of the same one. And why do I want to kill people now? They didn’t match. One set of balls was smaller than the other set. So we hiked back to the lamp store and plopped them down on the counter.

"Hi. We bought these lamps and they don’t match. See how the pull chains are different? These balls are smaller than those balls. Plus they hang crooked. And when you pull on one, the chain grinds."

"I see."

"And one of the sockets is broken. The bulb won’t light."

"OK."

"And see how the shine is duller on this one versus the other?"

"Uh-hmm."

We expected to hear "We’re sorry. We’ll order another one." Instead we got "Hmmm, not sure what I can do here."

"Say what?"

"They were imported. I’m going to have to let the company know. They might not even know they’re having a problem."

Still taking in the part about "not sure I what we can do here," I almost missed that last little nugget "…they’re having a problem" as in, she didn’t feel she had any responsibility to make things right. Lady, it’s not the company who has a problem. You have a problem. Me.

She said she’d call today and let me know what the company can do for us. Said she’d order another set and maybe they’d come in identical.

What. The. Hell.

"Maybe they’ll come in as a matched set? I don’t understand."

"Sometimes this happens with lamp manufacturers. You can’t guarantee that if you order two, they’ll be identical." She even had the nerve to say "If you hadn’t seen the two mismatched ones together, you wouldn’t even have noticed the brass balls were wrong if they’d both come in with the balls you don’t like."

"But we ordered the lamp with the bigger balls. They look better than the smaller balls. We want the bigger balls."

I asked her to cancel the replacement order. Fine. And why am I still cranky about this? Because we’re total idiots and left the lamp shades at home and now we have to drive another 40 miles to return them. We thought they would just replace the lamps and so we didn’t think to take the shades with us.

So now we’re just hoping the stupid lamp store will reimburse us at 100%. And I’m hoping a place that sells the brass lamps with big balls will come to me in a vision. We are angry and still lampless. Will someone please throw us a bone?

All we wanted was nice, normal furniture and lamps with balls that match. We do not know what we’ve done to deserve this. A friend of mine said he recently had to replace his furniture and he and his wife went to ONE store and picked out things they liked in TWENTY MINUTES. I hate him and I hope all his stuff falls apart the day after his warranty runs out.

UPDATE 11/27: Dave dropped off the shades today and we got a full credit for everything. We’re back to square one again, but at least the nonsense with the lamp store is over!

Stumble it!