Given the astronomical federal debt and the exorbitant amount of money our beloved Uncle continues to spend every year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our offices must be filled with premium furniture. If you were to actually walk around the average federal office, though, you’d be disabused of that notion fairly quickly.
Our cube farms are filled with the kind of low-bidder junk I’d be embarrassed to have seen in my home. I suppose there’s really no way to make a sea of cubicles look stylish or comfortable, but it’s obvious that it’s not even really a consideration. I’m currently sitting in a budget type office chair that was bought about 12 years ago when these buildings were first raised from the swampy shores of the Chesapeake.
I didn’t realize how bad our in-office seating options were until the plague set in. One of my first orders of business when work from home became the rule rather than the exception was to set myself up with a really nice chair. Sure, I got mine at a questionably deep discount from an entirely dubious source deep in the post-apocalyptic looking docklands of Wilmington, Delaware… but that’s beside the point here. The simple truth is having a properly designed, if expensive, place to sit made a world of difference in what otherwise devolved into regular pain from my upper back to my tailbone.
Since echelons higher than reality decided it’s important that we spend lots of time back on the cube farm six months ago, I was feeling every day of it thanks to my low-bidder, decade-old office chair. However, thanks to a thoughtful note from my doctor and my willingness to be a pain in the ass by requesting a workplace accommodation in hopes of making my back feel a little less like shattered glass, I’ve got a spanking new twin to the chair I’ve been enjoying at home. Well… “have” is a word that gets us into trouble. I’m assured it’s somewhere in the building and was going to be delivered before I closed up shop for the day. Close of business came and went without me catching site of my new seat. It’s the kind of Johnny on the spot services I’ve come to rely on from the United States Government.
I could have saved our Uncle about $1000 if they’d have just let me pull $300 in petty cash and head over to my shady source of supply in Wilmington, but hey, that seems to be frowned upon by resource managers… so, full retail it is. My fancy new Steelcraft Leap isn’t going to make days in cubicle hell any better, but it will help prevent them from inadvertently being any worse, so that’s something.
First though, I’ve got to get the thing from receiving and then inevitably spend more time than seems necessary figuring out how to put it together. Then I can take the thing for a proper test drive and enjoy that new chair smell.
Tag Archives: chair
On the logical limits of “treat yo’ self…”
I’ve had the same desk chair since sometime around 2008 or 2009. It’s a fine chair. It still looks good and isn’t held together by bailing twine or duct tape. After more than a decade of periodic use and now the better part of a year of daily use, it does seem to be starting to show its age, though. The seat is a little out of level, which can’t be doing much to improve the occasional nagging pain in my left hip. Otherwise, it looks almost new – no small feat considering its survived at least three household moves.
I only bring this up because I’ve started poking around online office chair retailers. There’s a phrase I never really expected to use, but as the plague rolls on, I’ll eventually have to look seriously at replacing the current model with something new. Knowing the terrain before starting my search in earnest felt like a worthwhile effort, though… especially since I picked my current seat out of a shed full of leftovers and seconds in someone’s back yard.
Years ago, surely following a fit of spending end of the year money before it expired, I worked in an office that had Aeron’s at everyone’s desk. Back then it was a slick chair, felt good, and was enormously adjustable for each individual. I thought maybe I’d look into getting one of those for myself, in the clearly misguided belief that like giant televisions, the price of fancy office chairs would decrease over time.
Boy did I call that wrong.
So, am I actually thinking about spending something close to $1000 on a desk chair? They’re comfortable and it’s tempting. I find myself stuck somewhere between “treat yo’ self” and middle-aged disbelief that reasonable person would spend that much on a chair that doesn’t recline and vibrate. For now, the whole discussion is purely academic – to be shelved for further review some time in 2021 when my political masters aren’t fighting over funding the government one week at a time.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Ass pain. A sure sign you spend too much time trapped in cubicle hell is that the low-bidder chair that goes along with it slowly starts physically damaging you. It’s not a problem in my nice fancy office chair at home or even in the slightly-higher-than-low-bidder chairs in the conference rooms. Until fairly recently I didn’t even know a tailbone was something that could hurt. I guess you can now add work-related ass pain to the list of things you have to start dealing with as you approach 40 that a twenty year younger version of you never considered.
2. Allegations. We now live in a country where all it takes is the allegation of wrong doing to end a career or destroy a lifetime of work. For all those people cheering the fall of people who “probably” or “may have” done bad things, be careful what kind of world you’re cheering on, because we’re all going to have to live in it. Then again it worked out well enough for the witch hunters of Salem.
3. Junkies. I had my eye on you from the second I pulled into the gas station. I saw the swerving lean on the trash can and then back the other way. I saw your knees seem to buckle, but you miraculously stay on your feet. I’m a little impressed that you made it across the parking lot without getting yourself run over in the process. God, it seems, protects junkies as well as drunks, small children, and ships named Enterprise. I appreciate your determination, but you see, you picked the absolute wrong person at the absolute wrong time of day to ask for a handout. I’m here pumping gas at 6:45 AM so I can haul myself to the place where I exchange my time for someone else’s money. You might try doing the same. You’re a man every hour as old as I am with maybe a few to spare – so I don’t feel at all guilty at thinking that you should be somewhere earning your own keep. In times past, that use to be the defining characteristic of being a man. In today’s world where everything is an illness and we’re supposed to be full of pity and understanding, it’s not fashionable to say things like that. Fortunately, I’ve never been one to give a damn about what’s fashionable. I can’t seem to do much to discourage the state from pouring ever increasing amounts of money down your rabbit hole, but I’ll be damned before I willing give one slim cent to anyone who decides chasing their high somehow entitles them to a living from my work and wages.
Goodbye to a second hand chair…
It’s no surprise that I’m a man who enjoys his comforts. For fifteen years, one of those comforts was a second hand La-Z-Boy that came into my possession in 1997. Since then it moved through two college dorm rooms, a travesty of a senior-year apartment, an efficiency at the southern tip of Maryland, my bunker-style condo, Petersburg, Virginia, three months in Army storage and then onward to Ellicott City, my Memphis exile, and two houses here in the northeastern corner of Maryland.
I think it cost all of $50 way back when. A lot of furniture has passed through my hands since then, but it was the one item that stayed. Some would say it stayed longer than it 
should have, but I kept it because it was still comfortable and, maybe more importantly, because it was surprisingly sentimental. It was one of the few things still around from when I set out on my own.
It reached the end of it’s run when I moved into the new place here. Even I couldn’t come up with sufficient justification to keep a broken down, worse than threadbare, La-Z-Boy around. In the early hours of Saturday morning, I consigned it to the good earth of Cecil County. It feels like the whole thing should have been done with a bit more ceremony than simply hurling it off the back of the truck – a sad end for 17 years of good and faithful service.
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