Chairs……..?!
A blog about chairs……my my…….yawn…..Oh well. I do blather on.
Five years ago, when we opened our first (company owned) location on Northcrest, we decided it might be nice to stop sitting in the miserable collection of garbage we’d acquired off the side of several roads and other crappy chairs repositories. My first thought was the ever constant Herman Miller Aeron. A great chair to be sure. A chair that always conjured the image of success and good taste. But alas, thanks to the dot-com boom and bust of the Clinton era, I now associate the chair more with pretentiousness and failure! All those Herman Miller chairs on E-Bay selling from all major city’s circa 2001 - briefly owned by hordes of dot-commer “would be” visionaries. Coffee swilling, turtleneck wearing, PDA obsessed tech junkies sitting at the helms of a thousand sinking ships in their mighty AERON!!
Feh!
I always wanted one. When the day came that I could finally afford and justify one, I didn’t want it anymore. Same thing with Harley Davidson’s! So I called an associate who is a member of the interior designer’s guild and asked him what his thoughts were on chairs. We were ready to spend some real money for once and I wanted to weigh all our options. “Aeron’s are nice,” he said “but they’re kinda’ passe’ now. There’s a great line out now from Humanscale that you should check out.” And so we did. The first round we ordered for the Northcrest store were the “Freedom Chair” models - a refreshing design detour from the overwrought technical look of the Aeron. I just want to sit down, not meld my ass to H.R. Giger’s bad dreams - fer cryin’ out loud! For the Decatur store, we just ordered a whole mess o’ the “Liberty Chair”. OK - the patriotic themes are pretty amusing. Even our toilet at Northcrest is called “The Patriot” ! What the HELL is going ON here?! Anyway - the Humanscale chairs are pricey - like all high end chairs, and various people have scoffed at the amount of dough we shell out for these things. But “here’s the thing”:
1) The chairs come with a lifetime warranty. ANYTHING that breaks is fixed at our location from their local office branch in Atlanta. Great service.
2) If you want to keep your people happy while they pound on hardware repairs and wheedle out solutions for all manners of IT issues all the live-long day, you damn sure need to provide a high quality, comfortable cradle for their hams to luxuriate in while they do so!
3) They look cool and they’re not made by Herman “freakin’” Miller. That IS his middle name btw.
4) We’ve got a “connection”…….you think I’d pay full price for these things?! Hells No my friend!
YES. I blogged about chairs. Time to up the dosage I guess.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:02 am
You blogged about chairs…
At least my blog now has some company down here in the land of nonsensical amusement
Naw, but they are good chairs… I come from a carpeted environment so I’m still trying to adjust to the fact that they WHOOSH away if you nudge them a bit, whereas my last chair I had to fight with to get it to move…
Meh. Chair thoughts at 1 in the AM… Time for some shut-eye… Does anyone else even read these?
March 30th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
“Does anyone else even read these?”
Yes! And I even enjoyed reading it. But then I get my excitement from clutter clearing closets so maybe … hmmm.
I enjoy
your blog whenever I visit, Justin.