Because Your Office Chair is Disintegrating

This is a recession, people. Did you know that? It is Armageddon out there. People are flying out of windows for crumbs of bread and beating each other in the streets for shelter.

Actually they aren't, unless you are in my weekly staff meeting.

As an employee I just ask for some basic amenities: a lunch break, a working soap dispenser in the bathroom, a coffee maker and just maybe, a window shade that lowers more than a quarter of an inch.

Since I spend more than eight hours a day developing chair ass, it would also be nice to have a proper office chair. One that does not have holes in the arms, strange grease stains on the seat or leave your lumbar susceptible to all sorts of fun things like muscle spasms and pinched nerves.

But we are in a recession remember. If you don't like it, you can stand, because you should be happy you have a job that gives constant paycuts and furloughs. So you go into the "break room" filled with more damaged chairs, a UV-leaking microwave and a college fridge, and you take four generic non-brand Ibprofin that you secretly believe to be chalk and hope that this time the sulfate kicks in.

Naturally, it doesn't and you end up walking around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame from 9-5 Monday to Friday until you wake up one morning to find that walking is no longer an option.

Doctor 1 ($20 co-pay, $10 medication): "Take these to decrease the enormous amount of swelling in your back and come back if it doesn't work."

Return Visit ($20 co-pay): "It did not work".

Back Specialist ($40 co-pay, $40 co-pay x-ray, $40 co-pay MRI for back and neck): "I see the two herniated discs from when you played soccer, but now I also see a pinched nerve and extreme stress in your lower back. You must attend physical therapy for six weeks, two times/week ($20/visit, lost time at work), and get a new ergonomic chair. Here is a note".

In the course of those six weeks at physical therapy, you work like Christopher Reeve to feel 24 years old again and re-learn how to walk. Meanwhile, two other people in the office are defeated by the chair: one with a neck spasm, another with a lower back injury.

As you and your co-workers sit in the next staff meeting with heating pads and ice packs and Vicodin, with hundreds of dollars of new debt from medical care, you ask your boss if you can get a new chair. "We are in a recession. I will email you a picture of how to sit up straight."