An Office Chair Wheeled Straight From Heaven

There are few excitements in life when you work in an office. A big one is new office supplies. Today I came back from lunch (very late by the way, so in fact, I snuck back in from lunch) and I found a brand new, state of the art, Aeron Posture-Fit adjustable office chair in my cubicle!

At first I thought there’d been a mistake. I wanted to find some maintenance person in the halls and be like “Wait, you don’t seem to understand. My cubicle has come to be known as the place where office equipment goes to die. This can’t possibly be right. I want my old chair back before I start getting a big head. You’ll know which one it is. It has ripped upholstery and one wheel is sort of cock-a-mamie. And if you sit on it and wheel it to the right too fast, it makes a sound like a dying cat. And if you lean back too far, a spring pops loose that makes you freeze in your recline and wonder if that sound was the chair or your back giving out. Kindly fetch my chair from the dumpster, where it most assuredly is. I know my place in this office and I won’t have it any other way.”

Honestly, my cubicle is filled with old equipment. My computer is old and grainy and when you want it to do something complicated, like open an excel file, it crunches and cranks like it’s using a cheese grader to produce results. I think there’s a hamster running on a wheel that makes my computer run. Also, all of my office supplies seem to be the office rejects. I have rusty scissors that look like they were left over from when the company began, and if I want any kind of “new technology”, like, for example, a 3-hole punch, it takes 6 weeks to order it.

When I first got here, the assistant told me to make a list of everything I needed in my cube. I was so excited by this prospect. I was gonna make my cube the picture of modern office living. So I spent an entire work day picking out the kind of calendar I wanted. One with a tree of the month on it? One with inspirational quotes? One with a dry erase option? The possibilities were endless and I was so excited. After flipping through pages and pages of calendars, I realized I’d been looking for a few hours, and that was verging on just plain crazy. So I picked one and then moved on to mouse pads.

So after ordering all sorts of things to make my cubicle livable, I sent my order in and sat back to await all my supplies. After all, who can work without an ergonomic floating-gel-cushioned wrist guarded mouse pad? I sure can’t. So I refused to do anything too complicated until everything came. Then I got the sad news from our assistant. Almost everything I wanted was on back order. But there were a few nice Bic ball point pens I could have. Great. I guess it’s understandable. I mean, you can’t get those very unique and hard to find bright yellow post-it notes just anywhere, right?

Then the next day, there’s a voicemail telling me that my calendar is in! Hooray! At least now I have something to hang up on my cube wall besides the black and white photocopied announcement of the office luau which is in 6 months. I rip off the saran wrap and look at my brand new calendar… for 2005. What kind of numbskull orders a calendar in July for the next year? Obviously I’m not thinking ahead that far! “Um, yes I know it’s a bit odd to want next year calendar already, but I’m a very busy and organized person and I’m actually currently booking well in February.” I have trouble even planning what I’m doing this weekend, much less in 2005! So that’s what I have at my desk so far. A calendar I can’t use and some Bic pens that have the ends chewed off, which was probably done by the person I replaced who was impatiently waiting the arrival of their own office supplies!

Plus, my desk is set at the height of a midget. I keep having to remind the assistant that I want it raised and each time I have to re-convince her that it’s necessary. “Are you sure, Heather?” “Yeah, I know. But call my crazy, I like my knees to fit under the desk.” “It’s just that I think this is the standard height.” “Well, the bruises on my knees and the curse words coming from cubicle every now and then beg to differ. Are you saying I’m abnormally tall?” A lot of people in the office have mentioned that they think I’m tall. This is weird to me, because I’m only 5’8’’. There’s an intern here from the same school as me and he’s 6’6’’. So one girl came up to me and said, “Is everyone from your school really tall?” Yes. Because THAT’S what our school’s really known for. Tall people. Yes, in fact, we take classes from about 9 till 3, and then we all gather on the football field for stretching exercises to grow taller. That’s one of the reasons I picked that school… for the excellent tallness professors and the nationally recognized tallness program.

So, I finally got this new, ergonomic chair. I’m very excited by it. But, there seems to be one think wrong with it. It has a weird smell. When I first walked up to my cubicle and saw it, I got so excited. But as I ran up to it, I got this whiff of old Chinese food. Great, I thought, the lordy lordy girl in the cube next to me must be having Chinese food for lunch while she reads her Bible today. (That girl is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.) But now, each time I leave and come back, I smell the smell again! I’m convinced it’s now my chair. All I ask is that the smell doesn’t stick to me so that I have old Chinese food chair smell on me all day. So while I take great joy in wheeling around the halls in it and adjusting it up and down and up and down until it starts to make groaning noises, I can’t help but notice it’s a stinky little chair. But that’s ok. Nobody’s perfect. Not even free office chairs.