I've discovered a new way to gauge the intrinsic worthiness of a man. No, I'm not talking about his salary, not the high regard of his peers, not the adoration of his underlings. If you want to know the true measure of a man, just look at the chair he sits in at work.
I'm in the market for a new chair for our home office. My current chair has been supporting my butt since before college. It's a Costco special. Actually, it's a Price Club special. Damn, it's old.
I picked it up for a pittance. It's never been truly comfortable. The padding's been a bit too thin and stiff. Despite the high back and all the levers on it, I've never managed to discover exactly the right position of seat and back that would lead me to sitting nirvana. The damn thing was parsecs ahead of the prehistoric, solid wood torture devices that they stocked in the dorms.
It sports a bunch of scuff marks from many moves between SoCal and college, and between Washington State and California. I've Febreezed the seat a few times. No comment. It doesn't fit under our current computer desk workstation thingy, which annoys my wife no end.
Anyway, the old workhorse is finally giving up the ghost. The tilt lock mechanism for the seat and back doesn't lock any more. I sit in the thing and it feels like I'm riding a really lame mechanical bull. Yee-haw.
Part of me thinks that all the twisting and rocking must be doing my back some good. For chrissakes, folks at work have taken to trying to sit on friggin' yoga balls. So how in the hell did the yoga masters of 1500 B.C.E. manage to master anything without blinkin' great plastic balls? Sheesh.
My wife, bless her frugal heart, has asked me if there's anything we can do to repair the chair. I say "no". Condensed into that single syllable is "No. I've had the damn chair since the beginning of time. I've gotten my money's worth out of it. It's ugly and beat up. It's never been comfortable. I'd probably need to drill out a bunch of spot welds just to get at the mechanism, which is probably unserviceable and non-repairable anyway. A replacement chair should cost less than $70 and I have a bazillion things I'd rather be doing, some of them actually productive things, than spend a few hours futzing around with that damned chair."
Harlock has recently been in exactly the same position after being laid low by a college-era chair. He brought home a sexy, mesh, Aeron-looking, comfortable dealie for very little bank, so I asked his advice.
While crawling around the URLs he sent, I saw a distinct pattern arise.
There are three classes of chair: executive, manager, and task. I like to call this last category "drudge".
The executive thrones shout out something like "I am a man of power and means. Despite the fact that, if I'm doing my job effectively, my ass should spend as little time in this chair as possible, the chair is huge. The back of the chair, like my penis, is tremendous. In fact, the back reclines enough so that my secretary can easily straddle my penis, which is tremendous. The chair has more panels, levers, joints, and gas-charged struts than a GX-9900-DV Gundam X Divider, even if I have not the faintest clue what that is. If BMW or Lexus made an executive chair, I'd have two each, but for now I make do with this $900 monster. I never let my skin touch anything but wool, silk, leather, solid hardwood, carbon fiber, or titanium. Yes, my keyboard is handcrafted from carbon fiber and titanium alloy. Behold my chair and tremble, ye unwashed plebes!"
If the executive models are the most amusing, I find the manager chairs are the most sad. It's as if the managers are trying their damnedest to circumvent some twisted set of corporate sumptuary laws. They need something to distinguish themselves from the workers they lord over, yet they're not allowed the regal excess of the executive chair. In the end, the manager chairs all look like stunted executive chairs in a lot of ways. The backs tend to be a bit lower. There's more fabric and less leather. You have fewer levers and struts. You're also less likely to find carbon fiber and Shiatsu massage fingers.
Finally, we come to the task, or drudge, chair. These are the chairs that temps sit in for ten hours a day. There's very little attempt to make the chair look like anything other than a cheaply pasted-together collection of steel and plastic. The seat backs are tiny and the padding is thin. Any adjustability is probably the barest minimum in order to avoid any anti-ergonomic workers comp claims. These chairs and the butts in them are the lowest of the low rungs on the corporate ladder.
So the next time you're strolling through Cube Land, take a gander at the chairs. Those pieces of furniture can tell you a lot.
Pakeha