The Chair

In our home, the front room, which might have been used exclusively for having tea with important folks like the Queen of England or Sir Elton John, serves a more practical purpose – it’s the room where our whole family indulges in internet pleasures like blogging and playing Everquest.

Each of us has a computer, a cluttered desk, and a chair. This means we can all sit down as a family and ignore each other together.

Some of us have more difficulty in the sitting department than others do.

My husband’s chair has, in my opinion, seen better days. It has a huge hole on one of the arms, but more importantly, it frequently collapses with him in it.

It is not a collapsible chair.

Or, at least it wasn’t when he bought it.

He used to make a bit of a scene when it collapsed. He’d be typing along and fall over backward onto the carpet, then he’d loudly curse his luck, wrestle with the chair for a few minutes, give up, go get a hammer, beat on it until it was suitable for sitting in, curse a little more for good measure, and finally resume typing.

But, now he’s quite nonchalant about the situation, and frankly, it just cracks me up. Lately, the scene I witness is more like this:

Michael is typing along and falls over backward. Never missing a beat and without uttering a single disparaging word, he stands up off of the floor, grabs his trusty hammer, which is conveniently lying on his desk for use on these occasions, and proceeds to pound the living shit out of his chair. When he finds it to be sufficiently beaten into submission, he quietly and casually goes back to whatever it was he was doing before the interruption.

Feel free to laugh at him. I do.

He can afford a new chair, but when I suggest buying one, he balks at the idea, saying, “This one is broken-in.” And, I suppose he’s half right – it is broken.

Maybe if I had more of a conscience, I’d force the issue. But, sometimes we all need comic relief, and there’s nothing like a little deadpan office-chair humor to put the smile back on my face.