Ergonomic chair humor: Sitting the big test

Sitting the big test

For those readers who are just dying to sit down, I have good news. I stumbled yesterday upon an eight-page manual entitled Adjusting Your Chair.

Yes, it seems that someone bright person has finally worked out how chairs work - which must come as a great relief to people who say they like standing but are in fact too embarrassed to sit on chairs in public for fear of doing it incorrectly and thus making fools of themselves.

But I wonder: just who is going to take the time to wade through eight pages of telling them how to correctly sit down and get to work?

Nobody reads manuals, do they?
OK, maybe fighter pilots do before they take off.
But not normal people like you and me. Not for computers or phones or cars. We just wing it, right? Manuals are things we turn to as a last resort after things go wrong.

I must be getting old. I learnt to sit on chairs by trial and error: falling out of my high chair as a baby and falling off my bar stool as an tipsy young adult.

When I started work, there were only two types of chairs in our office: grey ones and brown ones, and I honestly could not say that one was any more crappy than the other.
They did the job in perfect unison with our desks. The chairs did not go up, and the tables did not come down. There was no such thing as Repetitive Strain Injury.

You certainly did not have to swot up on a manual to sit on one of those old chairs.
If fact, I distinctly remember a crusty old news editor telling me to "bloody-well sit down and do some work".
He never asked me if I was qualified to sit down or asked to see my learner's permit.

Admittedly, the manual I saw yesterday is for no ordinary chair.
It is the latest whiz-bang ergonomic chair, complete with back height adjustment, tension knob, back-tilt adjustment and seat-tile adjustment.

But my pop-up toaster has a tension knob and a lever and it did not come with a how-to-cook-toast manual for goodness sake. Or, at least, if it did, I never read it.
I am proud to say I learnt the hard way not to put my fork in the toaster to prize out my burnt toast.

My guess is that the boss scattered the ergonomic chair manuals around the office, for us to read in between keystrokes, so that if an employee ever pulls the wrong lever and gets catapulted through the skylight, the boss can say to the health and safety inspectors, "Well, it's not my fault he didn't read the manual. I did warn him."

Imagine how thick the manual is for the boss's chair.

Bosses always have bigger chairs than employees.
I do not know why. It is not as if they neccessarily have bigger bottoms than the rest of us, and they spend a lot of their time sitting on chairs at meetings in other people's offices anyway.

It is truly frightening to think how many levers and red buttons George W. Bush, the most powerful politician in the world, has on his White House chair.

Dubya often leaves his office, too, you know. He recently visited us in Canberra to address a joint sitting of the Australian houses of parliament.

He came with many hundreds of cronies and security people charged with his safety.

The Australian Government obviously did not think he had enough protection though because it provided a few more hundred people, including some people dressed up as police officers who weren't actually ridgy-didge police officers at all but clerks, albeit with excellent working knowledge of police department chairs.

The Australian Government also provided a few fighter planes to patrol the skies over the Canberra region every seven minutes for more than 20 hours.

Yep, for nearly a full day, it was very noisy here in Canberra.

And, while Dubya might have slept soundly, I did not feel particularly safe.

I kept thinking: "Gee, I hope those guys up there have read the manuals about their new ergonomic ejector seats and missile launchers."

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it