Have a Seat

My father's desk chair for his little home office.
Mom got it for him in the 1970s from a mail-order company.
It arrived as a kit which Dad then assembled himself.

 

For eight hours every workday, many Americans sit in chairs.

And if those chairs aren't comfortable for them, those Americans tend to complain about it.

Sophisticated ergonomic chairs have become their own industry, since medical problems can be caused at least partially by poorly-designed chairs.  Supportive seating equipment is to the modern American office what hardhats are at construction sites, and goggles at welding shops.

I used to work for a major national healthcare company, at one of their regional distribution centers here in North Texas.  My boss, and his boss, were in charge of facility management.  We had a secure cold storage area, where at one time, the bulk of this country's flu vaccines were housed (talk about "cold" "storage"!).  This facility also featured a vast traditional warehouse, an intricately complex robotic storage/retrieval system from Germany that sorted a myriad of small drop-ship medical items, and two separate call centers on two floors.

The German robot broke down a lot.  A LOT.  Often, my boss and his boss could address its maladies, and there was a separate room full of computer servers just for that robot.  Whenever I'd see my boss's boss suddenly burst from her office and sprint to the robot's computer room, I knew we were down!  There were several times they had to call for emergency technology teams to fly here from Germany to fix it.  

The warehouse workers had multiple layers of protective rules from widely-adopted industry standards and government regulations that addressed most of their problems and safety concerns.  Even though we didn't have a union shop, all OSHA rules still applied, and they are many, and detailed.  The bulk of my job involved making sure we stayed in compliance with them.

Meanwhile, the call center workers in our building didn't have the same type of protocols regarding their comfort, health, or addressing whatever safety issues they encountered.

Issues like really uncomfortable chairs.

Long before I worked there, their office staff had been complaining about the chairs in which they sat.  As the company had grown over the years, combining employees from acquired companies, it had collected not just personnel, but all of the office equipment associated with those other firms.  You wouldn't think office chairs would factor significantly into the merger and acquisition activity that has taken place during America's healthcare industry consolidation, but they did.

Up in the second floor call center, which was the larger of the two in our building, very few people had the same style of chair in their otherwise uniform cubicles.  And none of those chairs were new.  Many of them featured all manner of amateurish ergonomic fixes, usually involving pillows from home and duct tape.  Not only did they look awful and unprofessional, they really didn't provide their occupants with the support they needed to sit for eight hours every day while they typed away on computer keyboards and handled one phone call after another.

Ultimately, it wasn't the aesthetics of those chairs that finally got to company managers.  It was the ever-increasing complaints from employees forced to tolerate the ergonomic dysfunctionality of those chairs.  I'm not sure about the raw data regarding non-ergonomic chairs and health problems, but for a healthcare company, things finally clicked:  Uncomfortable workers were not a good selling tool when those folks were on the phones with customers all day long.

So eventually, the decision was made to get rid of all the old call center chairs - every single one of them - and replace them with a standard ergonomic model for everyone.  Nothing fancier for supervisors, nothing piecemeal for one person to claim any disadvantage if they considered their new chair inferior to somebody else's.

I was not directly involved in selecting that new chair, but I heard it was quite a process in and of itself.  Management contracted with a third-party chair supplier who then brought on-site an assortment of models from various manufacturers for employees to evaluate.  I was told things upstairs became intense.  Apparently it was a combination of excitement over finally getting to participate in some progress, mingled with anxiety over this progress getting botched if an inferior chair was selected.  Whatever the emotion, there were plenty of them while folks registered their preferences.

And I get that.  My job involved a lot of walking in the cold storage area and warehouse, so my workdays weren't all spent in a chair.  And corporate America, no matter the industry, isn't known for robust employee engagement.  So being able to help create a significant solution to a real problem was no small thing.  The drama of that process was tiresome, but understandable.

But we hadn't seen anything yet.

A new chair was finally selected.  Dozens of them were ordered.  I think we were talking about 60 or 70 of them.  When the new chairs arrived, everyone's mood upstairs turned positively ebullient!

Meanwhile, my bosses and I had been discussing how we were going to dispose of 70 office chairs, all of them in various stages of dilapidation.  Considering the size and purpose of our facility, we certainly had huge dumpsters out back, but those were already being filled from our normal activities.  Would a local charity take them?  No, because even the needy shouldn't be expected to want what we'd already deemed uncomfortable and even unhealthy.  I can't remember how we'd decided to dispose of them, but suddenly, it didn't matter anyway.

You see, it was my task to get the old chairs out of the cubicles and make sure everybody got a nice new chair.  I remember going upstairs and being in a good mood, anticipating participating in something grand and fun with long-suffering co-workers.  What could go wrong?

I began with the cubicles that were currently unstaffed, pulling out the chairs and lining them up against a wall.

"What are you going to do with those?" one of the call center employees suspiciously snapped.

"Um, they're getting disposed of," I replied nonchalantly.  I thought nobody wanted these chairs.  People had been complaining about them for years.  It's why the company went through this huge process to buy new ones.

I was wrong.  

Instantly, a whole new maelstrom erupted.  "But I want to keep my chair!"  Over and over, co-workers began to chime in.  "I've sat in this chair for years!  It's like an old friend!  It's got character!"

Seriously.  People who one day before had professed loathing and disdain for their chairs were now strenuously protesting their removal.

I stopped, went downstairs, and told my bosses.  The three of us were incredulous.  And it didn't take long until managers from upstairs had been marshaled by their subordinates to insist we let people simply take their old chairs home with them.

Yes, they wanted the new chairs for their cubicles.  But they wanted their old chairs at home for their nostalgic value.

So I went back upstairs, and simply pulled out all of the old chairs so they lined the large room's walls.  Employees from the chair supplier then started dispersing new ones to each cubicle.  This furniture reshuffling took place while employees continuously juggled phone calls from customers.  They'd be taking their old chairs to their cars after their shift was over.

But not everything was over.  Out of the blue, a new cry emerged.

"Hey!  What about people on the first floor?  We want old chairs too!"

"Hey!  What about us administrative assistants in the executive offices down the hall?  Maybe we want old chairs too!"

I kid you not - suddenly junky old chairs were all the rage.

Literally.

My boss's boss had an MBA in facilities management, and she was as much in the thick of this as my boss and I were.  Other senior executives got dragged into it as well.  Before too long, we ran out of old chairs, so the disposal issue evaporated as a consideration.  We ended up giving away more chairs than the company had originally planned, and buying a few more new ones just to stop the chaos.

It all gave fresh relevance to the phrase, "No good deed ever goes unpunished."

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