Well I don’t confess to being much of an expert in office furniture, not working in the trade, but thought it might be nice to get someone else’s experiences rather than just the office furniture ‘nerds’.
As I have already said my line of work is not in office furniture it’s more to do with sick people which requires a fair bit of sitting and therefore I feel this qualifies me to talk about office chairs as I have sat on quite few in my time.

The thing about health care is you are never sure what’s going to happen and when. This can end up with some very busy shifts or some very long and boring shifts, often at strange times of the day and night. So we have come up with a few games to keep us amused and some of these games involve office chairs!

One of my favourites is ‘chair racing’. This cannot be done on a long lonely night shift spent on your own as a friend or colleague is needed. I’m sure you have a good idea what it entails but basically a course is set out and two chairs with wheels are found and it is a race (would like to say to the death but probably not a good idea in the environment it takes place). This often ends up with casualties as we tend to be fairly competitive!

The next is ‘colleague hurling’. This needs a very long and empty corridor. Someone is sat on a chair and their partner’s job is to launch them as far down the corridor as is possible. The winning team is simply the team who gets there chair the furthest. Now this has to be done as a team because there is skill required by the pusher and the pushee. It is very important to stream-line your body to obtain maximum travelling distance and weight distribution also plays a vital part in distance travelled. Of course you must not forget the poor old pusher who has to reach maximum power and speed but make sure the launch of the chair in a straight line.

One game that can be played on your own during those long and boring nights is seeing how many rotations you can achieve before the chair stops. Now I have only played this game once as after five or six goes I may have managed an impressive number of rotations but I felt decidedly sick and had to go and lie down for a few hours.

Moving slightly away from the subject of office furniture but still on ways to amuse yourself is drip stand racing. This is one of my favourites as it requires preparation to ensure that you have the best drip stand available. Drip stands are not regulated to the same extent as office chairs and the amount of wheels can vary from 3 to 5 but for stability the more wheels you have the better. You don’t want the drip stand to be too top heavy as this slows you down, therefore a fair amount of time is spent on securing the best ‘vehicle’ for your race. The race itself is usually a sprint and over quickly and again can end up with a high casualty rate.

Anyway back to office chairs. My boss recently got himself a nice new leather chair which he very proudly showed off to me. He went on to say how his old chair was about ten years old and had been used by two previous bosses prior to him and how much stressful time had been spent sitting in this fabric chair and all the body fluids that must have collected in it. He then asked if I wanted his old chair………