The Aerie
So I got a new office chair for Xmas from my in-laws. Really, they were very nice to get it for me.
I am a total pain in the ass to shop for: I either have everything I want, or whatever I want is so weird and esoteric that normal people can't find it. "A particular book or books by particular authors, at Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore (where a would-be thief recently got himself stuck in a chimney). A router - either a computer network router or a hardware woodworking router, either one. A 160GB IDE hard drive.
Is it too much to ask for a bestseller? Or a shirt? But no, I'm always asking for nonsense.
So when I finally got tired of repeatedly fixing the arm-rest on my existing chair (really, if I wanted to do it, it would only take a couple of right-angle brackets and a few screws, bolts and nuts, but I just don't want to), they jumped at the opportunity.
A chair! Why, he's asking for a one-word gift that you can buy at a store! Not since "a shirt" has a gift request been such a big hit.
So of course having received the unassembled chair, I sat on it for a few days. The assembly I mean, not the chair. Who wants to get into all that "tab A into slot B" stuff? Not me.
But finally I had to do it. My small basement office had three things in its limited floorspace: two half-broken office chairs, and a large box containing a working office chair. I couldn't move.
The one office chair with the loose armrest has already been described. All I can add to its description was that the five-wheeled base had these decorative wooden guards that slipped on top of the five thin struts. These fell off with regularity. I had also thought for a long time that both chairs were broken, because they intermittently would and would not recline: then I discovered that the height-adjustment handle pulls out and pushes in to allow and restrict the reclining feature. Operator error.
The other chair was a black piston-lift chair, very similar to the one my in-laws had gotten me. I'd found it upside-down in a dumpster, and after taking it home the problem became apparent - the piston had gotten bent and would no longer go up and down.
Otherwise it was in great shape, so I'd used it and the grey intermittently. But the black was stuck too low, and was uncomfortable after a while.
So okay, time to put the chair together. I moved both old chairs out (the grey to the children's computer, the black to my spouse), cleared about two hours from my schedule, gathered the band-aids, checked the number for 911, and practiced my swearing. I was ready.
In the end the chair turned out to be very simple. The piston simply rests in a pocket in the rolling base, and the chair rests on the piston. Works fine now, but if gravity ever gives out the thing will fly apart.
The tricky part was that the chair itself needed to be assembled: seat, armrests, and back. Still, it should be pretty easy: the front of the seat was labelled "FRONT", the cunning recline-swivel-rise bracket upon which the seat mounts was clearly labelled "FRONT", and the back was clearly labelled "FRONT". Each arm was not labelled "FRONT" but was labelled "LEFT" and "RIGHT." All I had to do was follow the instructions and I couldn't possibly go wrong.
First I mounted the seat the wrong way 'round on the mounting bracket, DESPITE the fact that the word "FRONT" on the one was on the opposite end from the word "FRONT" on the other. Of course, I tightened the bolts.
Amazingly, I got the arms on the correct sides of the seat on the first try, but I suspect this was because they simply wouldn't go on the other way.
I then put the back on facing backwards, and sat in the chair, before I realized that, no, it wasn't SUPPOSED to make me sit up straighter - that was simply the result of the back leaning the wrong way.
Then rather than deconstruct the whole chair (the assembly instructions were "put arms on back, mount back on seat"), I removed the back (leaving the arms on the seat) and flipped it around. To my complete amazement, this didn't break anything (yet... that I'm aware of...)
So now I have a nice cozy office chair: the arms stay on, the piston goes up and down, and it even spins nicely.
Nothing to it!
Posted by Albatross at January 8, 2004 1:49 PM