I’m about ready to kill my chair . . . .

My desk chair at work is a very frustrating thing.  Either the chair is defective or I weigh too much.   It could be both, but I’m going to choose to focus on the less offensive of the two possibilities.

The stupid chair is broken.

See?  It didn’t even start out as my chair.  It was somone else’s chair, and they left the department. 

 The chair I used to have was low . . . I mean L-O-W.  It was so low, my mom probably would have been comfortable in it.  But I didn’t care.  Not really.  It was a chair.  I could sit in it.  Of course, my legs were cramped and my neck was sore after a day of working in it.  (Yes, I know the library would buy me a new chair if I asked, but it’s so expensive . . . . .)

 So, when this person left our department, she left her chair too.  And I thought, “Surely this other chair is way better than the chair I have now.”  So I nicked it (after running it by my supervisor first . . . . who promptly told me that I should have asked for a new chair and that I shouldn’t worry about the cost . . . oh well). 

The new chair was a lot nicer.  It has nice upholstry and arms, and it will actually go up and down and back and forth and can glide across the hard carpet with ease.  Not like my old chair.  My old chair was a piece of junk.

So the other day, I noticed that my new chair was kind of low too.  So I said, no problem.  I’ll just raise it up.  And I did.  It was awesome!  To actually be at the correct height to work at my computer!  Amazing!

Then, it started.  It happened with no warning.  Nothing to prepare me for it.  The chair let go.  Whatever held it up (air brakes or hydraulics or whatever it is), it stopped holding and dropped me.  Just a little.  Not all the way.  Just enough to scare the crap out of me.  I remembered that we were in a library, and I didn’t scream bloody murder. 

So just as I was sitting, trying to figure out what had just happened, the chair let go again.  And in the space of about five minutes, I was all the way back down to the level I’d started at. 

I thought it might just be a fluke.  So I raised the seat up again.  But, nope, it let go once more.  It made me think of Aladdin . . . . you know the part where Iago bites down the side of Jafar’s staff until he smashes his head into the floor.  Like a car jack?  Yeah, I always laughed at that part in the movie.  But not at this.  This wasn’t funny.  It’s still not funny.  My chair is continuously letting go as I’m writing this (grrr . . . . there it goes again).

But it occurred to me as I was checking out books to someone (I do that a lot since I work in a library), that people do the same thing in their lives.  But not always with chairs.  They do it with people and material items and stuff.  They’ve got something, something that suits their needs and fulfills the duties it’s supposed to, but soon they’re not content with it anymore because they see something that looks better.

The grass is always greener, right?  Sheep can kill themselves trying to eat grass on the other side of a fence when the grass they’ve got ready access too is just fine. 

What about people?  Relationships.  Jobs.  Cars.  Clothes. 

We think that if we can just get the next thing, the newest thing, the best thing that we’ll be happy, but it often doesn’t work that way.  Usually the new thing we get is more work and it takes more work to keep up.  New clothes need to keep looking new.  New cars are the same. 

Like my chair.  My old chair didn’t move at all, so there was no problem.  I’m finding that the constant dropping and falling in my chair is more annoying than the whole being-too-short-for-my-computer issue.

So I guess I’m just relearning contentment.

We’ve always got more than we think we do.