Try it!

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Some things just can't be explained

Last week, there was a sudden frenzy of chair-exchanging at work. Somebody discovered a hallway full of chairs, and a whole bunch of folks decided a new chair would be better. Most of them swapped for a chair that I thought was indistinguishable from the chair they had. All of them are, as desk chairs go, mediocre. Let's face it, no business where the margins are as thin as in this business are going to spend big bucks on something that employees, ultimately, just have to live with, no matter how shitty the product is. Like desk chairs.

Now, I'm sure that the "permanent" employees of the agency have better chairs. But those chairs weren't in this pool of chairs. This was the shitty-to-mediocre chairs. I, naturally, kept the shitty-to-mediocre chair I already had, since it would be way too much effort to exchange one shitty-to-mediocre chair for another, virtually identical, shitty-to-mediocre chair.

One of the guys on the project, though, traded for a chair very unlike the chair he had before. Interestingly, this chair would almost fully recline. I'm not sure it has a feature to keep if from reclining in such an extreme fashion. I know that if I had this chair, I would be asleep in minutes, fully stretched out and snoring like a big dog. The advantage of my chair is that it is mostly too uncomfortable to sleep in, and when I am so tired I fall asleep anyway, I am slumped forward and don't snore, so my micro-naps go largely unnoticed. If I try to recline, my chair prevents me from getting much past vertical, so the whiplash I suffer when my head falls backward when I fall asleep wakes me up again. And trust me, this job is so boring, you will fall asleep, even if only for a micro-nap.

But the dude who traded for the full-recline chair? Great posture, never leans back, doesn't fall asleep because he's watching (apparently hilarious) Korean TV programs on his phone. Not sure why he opted for a full-recline chair. I suppose their are some questions to which mankind simply wasn't meant to know the answers. Go figure.

No comments: