Why Does Literally Everyone Own This IKEA Lamp?

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Dust, unidentified liquids, and maybe even food particles have accumulated up around the inside of that bowl that covers the lightbulb up on top.

You’d consider dusting the lamp, but then again why bother? It’s been in the right corner of the living room since you moved in and you’re not sure it’s been turned on since you and your roommates threw that party a few months back.

If you’ve recently moved in with a significant other, an argument was more than likely had regarding whether or not you guys should bring it along with you to the new place. Why you fought tooth and nail to bring it along is a mystery even to you. It’s a hideous lamp. It’s cheap and flimsy and it doesn’t go with your furniture but for some reason you want it.

If you have roommates you’ve definitely got one laying around in your house or apartment somewhere. Hell, you might have two.

It’s not a particularly attractive piece of furniture. You could have chosen to put a smaller lamp in the living room but you didn’t.

It’s thrown together in cheap with plastic parts and because it’s been disassembled and hastily put back together so many times during move-outs and move-ins that the leg that holds both the main lamp and reading light skews ever so slightly to the left.

It’s at an angle, but from a distance, it’s pretty much unnoticeable. Plus, you have to remember that it doesn’t even get used all that much.

It just sort of sits in the corner biding its time – waiting to either get thrown out in the dumpster behind your place or to get tossed in a storage closet in the basement never to be heard from again.

There is no doubt in my mind that even if you don’t think you own one, I’d go home and double check your hallway closet just to be sure. I’ve never stepped foot inside of an IKEA or ordered anything from them online and yet somehow, someway, I have one in my bedroom at this very moment. Most of the time there’s no real explanation for how this lamp got into your apartment.

You might have bought it, but there’s a better chance that you stole it from a roommate in college or found it upon move into one of the four or five apartments you’ve resided in since getting a real job.

The IKEA Floor Uplight/Reading Lamp has got to be the most popular item for the company of the past decade.

I don’t use this word lightly so please trust me when I say it: I see this lamp LITERALLY everywhere I go.

Restaurants, shared work spaces, and people glamping outside of the White House in protest of whatever Trump is doing at the moment – they’ve all got the IKEA uplight.

The additional reading lamp is, for lack of a better term, chopped liver. Nobody uses that fuckin’ thing. A lot of the time I’ll see the reading lamp portion and notice that the owner didn’t even bother to install a lightbulb in its socket.

And while I have seen this lamp in some pretty unusual places, the most popular spot to rest an IKEA uplight is without a doubt in the corner of a living room.

How it got there, who purchased it, or why it hasn’t been thrown out yet would be a mystery even to a halfway decent private investigator. The Uplight is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. It’s in the corner, and it will remain in the corner until someone throws it in a vat of battery acid. You and I will die someday, but the IKEA Uplight will unceremoniously live on forever. .

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Johnny D

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• jduda@grandex.co