Ever seen the Adidas ad “Impossible is Nothing”?
I’ll never forget the time when Kev gave me an “Impossible is Nothing” grin.
We’d travelled an hour and a half to IKEA late one evening to buy an emergency guest mattress that we needed for the next day.
It seemed like a safe bet - we had a Range Rover and it wouldn’t be difficult to fit one of IKEA’s rolled-up memory foam mattresses into it.
Speeding around the shop, we got the ticket from the display area after choosing the most comfortable mattress we could find, and headed to the pick-up area to collect our bundle.
It was 8:45pm and the shop shut at 9:00pm. We’d just about make it…
Unfortunately, when we got to the packing area, we realised they didn’t have our mattress on the pick-your-own shelves and we had to drive to a collection point to get it.
The assistant told us we’d have to get a wriggle on or they’d close the depot, so we F1’d it to the mattress collection point.
We got there just in time, adrenaline pumping.
We showed them the ticket, and waited for our foam, rolled-up mattress to emerge from the unit doors.
Except it didn’t.
What emerged was a huge, heavy cardboard box at least twice as large as boot of our car, even with the back seats down.
Oh God - this must be a mistake!
This can’t be the right one!
We got them to check the ticket number.
Balls!
We’d ordered the wrong one! We’d ordered a pocket sprung beast, packaged in layers of thick stiff cardboard with reinforced edges, that most definitely wasn’t going to roll up into a helpful ball for us.
It was too late to go back and change it.
IKEA was shut.
The collection depot was locking its doors and we were standing in the dark car park looking down at the huge package and up at the small space to fit it in.
We felt like we’d been given the task of fitting a horse through a cat flap.
We had nothing to strap it to the roof with. Surely we’d just have to leave it in the car park…
Kev said, “It’s going in. Let's get the edges off the packaging”
But even with the hard corners off, the package was too bulky to even start to fit through the boot opening.
We had to ditch all the cardboard and offered it up again.
It just about slid in widthwise at that point, but there were still acres of stiff, unyielding mattress hanging out of the back.
We flexed it as much as possible in an attempt to fit it in, but as soon as we got one corner under control the other one popped out again.
We were sweaty and tired.
We couldn’t drive all the way back with the boot open or we’d die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Uncharacteristically, I felt beaten. “This is impossible…” I sighed.
Undeterred, Kev said, “Rubbish. It’s going in!”
I don’t even know what wizardry he performed as I held one corner of the mattress hard down inside the car, blinded by my own grimace, but somehow he’d managed to compress the giant beast, centimetre by centimetre, into the available space and slammed the boot shut.
“F*ck me - you did it!” I panted, in grateful disbelief.
The look on his face in the photo says it all.
Strangely, the beast mattress looks quite relaxed from the front, but we had to stand clear when he opened the boot at home because it was under extreme tension!
Einstein once said, “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer”
Kev had the Einstein attitude when I was prepared to give up, and I’m grateful he did because I’ll remember the hilarious, smug look on his face long after the mattress has been and gone!
Is there something you’re almost giving up on because it looks impossible to achieve?
Just give it one more push…