One of us cannot sit in a chair without first adjusting it. Not any old chair, the chair they’re actually sitting in right now. Not even the chair they’ve sat in four hundred times. Not even if that chair is, by every logical measurement, already adjusted correctly. Lumbar in, lumbar out, armrests pushed up one notch, back pushed down one notch, down to the little lever underneath that nobody else even knew existed until they came along and started poking it on purpose. We’ve timed them.
Personal best is eleven seconds before they’ll type a single word.
The rest of us sit down and start working.
We like to think that makes us the normal ones, though we’re not here to decide that.
That said, we did eventually all agree on the same chair, which impressed approximately zero people more than ourselves. Especially when you consider how often this team of six cannot agree on what to order for lunch, involving numbers or otherwise.
We like being able to forget we’re sitting at all by four p.m. Every day. That’s the selling point right there. That’s the whole reason to buy an ergonomic chair. Tell someone else they’re about to own a chair that nobody wants to try and enthuse about for longer than fifteen seconds and they’ll listen. But trust us. You stop noticing your back by four o’clock. You’ll see.
Obviously the ones we don’t like are the ones that look like they absolutely WILL kill your back, but just haven’t had the chance yet. All angular plastic and suspicious tension. The ones that look like they belong in a doctor’s waiting room and you sit on in yours like some kind of twisted punishment every time you have people over. A chair you spend nine hours a day in still has to look like you want to sit in it when you’re having friends over, and half of us believe that’s more important than the other half will ever publicly acknowledge.
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The mesh or non-mesh debate divides our team harder than any of the above. Not in the jokes-about-splitting-in-two kind of way, we mean literally cannot agree. Some of us find them cool and relaxing, others imagine how much pressure you’d have to apply to actually sink into one and find that deeply unappealing. Nobody has changed their stance on the mesh vs non-mesh debate in the three years we’ve been discussing it so we have given up and buy whatever we want when we need one, privately laughing at everyone else all the way to the checkout.
The one thing we didn’t realise about living with an ergonomic chair long term, is that you end up finding yourself defending it to absolutely everyone who sits down in your house. They lean back, expectantly. Say “oh that’s nice” in that strange tone of voice people use when they were actually convinced you hated it, and then immediately start asking where you got it before they’ve even finished their congratulations. Never used to happen to us, until we got an ergonomic chair. It happens more than you’d think, these kinds of conversations.
It’s not the sexiest chair in the world, ours.
Supportive?
Hell yes. But it’ll never win a Interior House Design magazine cover contest. No matter how many you own.
The lever adjuster still adjusts theirs in other people’s chairs. At work, in restaurants, once at a dinner party in a friend’sseat we watched them re-adjust the chair they were sitting in. Twice. The chair in question had already made us pretty sure they weren’t eating dinner at our table, let alone sitting down, because a) it wasn’t ergonomic, and b) had no lever to start sliding around for. We sat them both down afterwards and watched videos of the Incident. Still didn’t feel like enough.
