The Coffee Place's Joke Stack
Pneumatic Chair, Neurotic Man
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IMHO #34: PNEUMATIC CHAIR, NEUROTIC MAN
by Thomas Burchfield
Dear Office Depot: I recently discovered, after years of bad posture and the committing of certain acts in certain positions best left unsaid, that I had become unable to swivel my head in desirable and necessary directions without encountering resistance and pain. I cannot turn my eyes upon the fair women populating our fair city. I cannot do my fine Linda Blair impersonation, (which involved eating a bowl of pea soup and sticking my fingers down my throat: always a hit at parties!).
I started physical therapy, which is enjoyable, except for confessing all my crimes whenever I'm on the neck stretching rack, which will be really interesting when it comes time to pay my bill.
I have confronted many issues regarding exercise, posture and relaxation. But the issue most relevant to me and yourselves, revolves around the concept of "chair."
My old desk chair, a hip post-modern silver, black and plywood affair, had done its duty over the years but no more. Already long past its ability to be adjusted for height, it forced me to sit three feet out from my desk, hunched over with my arms spread above the keyboard like Quasimodo preparing to fly off the walls of Notre Dame.
This, I was informed, was very bad posture. And it would have to stop if I ever hoped to regain not only the use of my neck, but also the ramrod-straight posture of my youth inspired by the movies of Stuart Whitman, whose own fine masculine posture (which he still has) I once so mightily strove to emulate.
It meant buying a new desk chair.
The decision where to purchase a new chair was simple. One of your vast stores is a mere three blocks from my fine, sunny apartment. I had studied your chairs before and noticed they are a bargain. They came with big impressive words like "ergonomics".
Ergo, last Saturday I marched into your store and chair-shopped. I inspected all the chairs on display. I sat in a half a dozen pneumatic models, pushing levers, moving up and down and shouting "WHEEEEEE!!!!" at the top of my lungs until one of your clerks asked me if I needed help.
That could have been read two ways, I suppose, but I pointed at a chair labeled "ergonomic". Its price was $139.99. That was higher than I wanted to pay by about a hundred and forty dollars, but nevertheless I said, "THAT is my chair!"
Fatefully, the store did not have that particular chair in stock. It would have to be delivered by appointment. I would have to stay home from work, on my dime, and await delivery. Frugal soul that I am, it hurts me, but I can take the loss. It will be ALL RIGHT, because I will have a chair and my body will thank me. With a fully functional neck, I will be able at long last to get my driver's license and spread terror and excitement on American roadways. We set the appointment for the following Tuesday. It may take all day, but at the end, I will be a New Man with a New Chair!
Tuesday arrives. I stay home from work, unpaid, all day. I try to write, but the City is tearing up the street outside my window for fun. I fret that the delivery person will be struck dumb at the sight of giant steam shovels and the pounding of jackhammers and flee in tears, leaving me chairless.
By five O'Clock, calculating in the time off, I have spent $320.69 (tax included)for a chair I do not have.
An angry visit to the store brings no answer. The clerk in charge knows nothing. They are not paid to know things. The more they know, the smaller their paycheck: that is how the retail industry functions.
I walk away from this mall of ignorance with only a promise I will be called tomorrow. The next morning, with only the flimsiest of excuses given, I am informed I will have to stay home again the following afternoon. I have no choice in this matter. I have climbed out too far to climb down.
My chair arrives at last Thursday afternoon. "So long, sucker!", the delivery person cackles as he throws the box on my living room floor and flies back out the door. But I will not be cynical! Surely it was only an example of ironic post-modern kidding!
I had no idea office chairs consist of over five hundred separate pieces. I found the instructions for assembly fascinatingly reminiscent of gigantic Byzantine mosaics. "Ah, this is a challenge!" I optimistically told myself. I poignantly recall how my scale model of the Titanic had sank when I tried to float it in my bathtub, before I could even throw the ice cubes in. At least I wouldn't get stoned on glue this time.
I labored all through the night. I cried. I wept. I shed blood, but by morning cock crow, I was that New Man with a New Chair!
I have little idea what went wrong next. My chair was the pneumatic kind that rode up and down on a cushion of air inside the central post. Maybe I tightened the screws a little too much. Perhaps the manufacturer made the mechanism a tad too springy.
Because, when I had finally completed assembly, I felt both exhausted and giddy with exuberant triumph. Perhaps I should have sat *slowly* in my new chair to allow it to adjust to my presence, but no, I jumped into it like Yakima Canutt leaping off a balcony onto a horse.
The chair reacted negatively. It catapulted me in the air like a pogo stick. Something hit me square on the top of my head. I blacked out. I awoke with a faceful of plaster, staring floor level at an unfamiliar pair of feet in an unfamiliar environment. The feet turned out to be my upstairs neighbor's. The environment was his living room.
This doesn't happen every day. Certainly, it was a unique phenomenon to my upstairs neighbor, but he ingeniously rose to the problem by repeatedly pounding a large heavy black kettle on top of my head, until nail-like, I disappeared back through the floor into my own domicile. Unfortunately I landed on my new chair and reduced it to its original five hundred parts.
That hole in the ceiling cost me. The neck brace won't come off for another six months, then it's another four years of therapy. America, I guess, will be a safer place without me on the roads until then. And everyone now calls me "Flathead."
Please, I'm not whining and complaining like some big-brained liberal, but it seems I deserve something more than a new chair at ten percent off, don't you think? How about a box of pencils? With erasers of course.
Sincerely,
Thomas "Flathead" Burchfield
[Thanks to Fred Allen for inspiration. No thanks to Office Depot however. IMHO is an occasional e-zine of opinion, humor and whatnot and it's FREE. Thomas Burchfield also writes for "Swing Time" Magazine
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