This post was published in Student Voice Volume 102, Issue 7 as “Wednesday blues healed by nifty spinning office chair.”
The UW-River Falls campus classrooms are sprinkled with a wide assortment of differing sorts of chairs. Many classes have those odd plastic ones with the slits in the back, which are probably there to help it flex? Whatever. Sometimes those have those pointless little desk attachment things on which you can fit maybe a third of a math textbook. In the Student Voice office, though, there are the classic office chairs. You know, the puffy padded ones that roll around and spin and stuff? Yes, those. They all share some major flaws. Mostly related to the wheels. God, do those wheels get scratchy. Making it obnoxious and difficult to roll around the room, it’s like all of the chairs just decided they didn’t want life to be easy for anybody trying to sit in them.
Except my chair. I love my chair. It is a god among men, is what it is. A chair to behold. The pinnacle of seating arrangements. It’s not particularly comfortable, just another office chair, but that is not what makes it so inherently better than all the other chairs I’ve sat in on campus. The wheels, they aren’t scratchy. Need to throw something away? Just roll it over. Need to see something on another table? Roll to it. Bored and just messing about? Roll around. The world is your oyster.
As I write this I am not sitting in that chair, merely reminiscing about the good times it and I had together not long ago… like three hours at most. The chair I am currently in is not nearly as good of chair. The welding between the seat and its stand is partially broken and as such produces an annoying screech whenever I reposition myself on it. The back has a part broken off that would normally keep it straight, but instead it just sort of flips around as it pleases. This chair is not an optimal chair. But this chair is the one I have in my room, the one from which I do most of my work.
I wonder how this chair would feel if it knew I had such strong feelings for another chair. Would it be sad to know that I despise it and dream of my life together with another chair whilst sitting atop it? Would it be lonely to think of the fun I am having with other chairs while I’m away? In the case that it does know, and that it is angry with me for being so adulterous with my chairs, I would like to point out that it brought this upon itself. It really is dissatisfying to sit in this one here – the screeching, the moaning, the constant shifting, the inability to return to a position previously held in it – all making it quite troublesome to work on my website. It really is not a good chair.
As such, I yearn for my chair in the Student Voice office. It does not yell when sat on, it does not scratch when it rolls. It is a decent chair, and it deserves all praise it is given. Though now that I have bragged about my chair so, I feel as if it will be necessary to protect my claim to that chair. Many others may seek the comforts it provides, but they must know that it is my chair, and no other’s. I quite love that chair.