When a Vitamin isn't good for you · Mar 16, 12:15 PM
For Christmas we got a computer to go in our sons’ bedroom, and to enable them to use it, we got a very plain stool from Ikea. All seemed well until a few months later…
The “Vitamin” stool (Ikea are famed for their quirky naming scheme) was very easy to assemble, pretty sturdy and basically functional. It raised and lowered with a standard gas lift mechanism. I quite liked the rounded shape and white plastic which vaguely reminded me of the furniture in the classic TV show Space: 1999
I had seen the children using the stool a few times and warned them about tilting or spinning on it, but the eventual injury wasn’t to be caused by either of those activities – it was caused by just sitting on the stool normally, because there was a basic fault in the design.
The top half of the stool is a moulded plastic shape with a fabric covered cushion attached by several screws. These heads of these screws can be seen around the lower edge of the stool, and the sharp points are located somewhere in the middle of the cushion, near the edge – that is the flaw.
So my son was sitting with his hand under his leg. He pressed down and the sharp point of the screw punctured his fingernail. Feeling the sharp pain he pulled his hand away quickly and the screw tore the fingernail.
Mouse over the small images to see them full size
We took the stool right back to the nearest Ikea store, which had newly opened in Coventry, where the staff were happy to provide a full refund and promised to get back to me on the safety issue (although they haven’t yet). The Coventry store was unusual for an Ikea – being a multi-storey building with state of the art facilities (car parking with indicator lights showing free spaces, huge lifts, and escalators that wheeled trolleys can be transported on.
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