January 22, 2024
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We were in an antique store yesterday. I’ve needed a new (different) chair for my office for quite some time. I’ve tried lots of different butt busters and padded fanny slings, but none suited the task. I even bought a modern “ergonomic” pneumatic job with more levers than a bulldozer and cloth that left marks in my leg like a smallpox victim’s face. It was about as comfortable as a bulldozer seat, too.
The antique shop had an old, broken down, wood swivel office chair. Mrs. Cottage spotted it and said it was just the thing. It had a heaping helping of His Girl Friday vibe. My wife is confused and thinks I’m a real writer and should at least sit like one. Could I fix it?
She went off to find the curator, as there was no price on it. I looked it over. It was too low, and the legs wobbled like a drunken writer’s, which I assumed was at least part of its pedigree. She returned and said it was twenty-five bucks, because it was busted and they wanted to get rid of it. A solid birch swivel office chair with arms, and all the casters in place. Someone had re-finished it, and the varnish still looked fresh. Twenty-five bucks.
The owner and I were locked in the embrace of asymmetrical information. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you can visit the Wikiup and get the skinny:
In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other.
Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which can sometimes cause the transactions to be inefficient, causing market failure in the worst case. Examples of this problem are adverse selection, moral hazard, and monopolies of knowledge.
The piquant part of our asymmetry was that both of us were working on imperfect information. The owners knew the chair intimately, because they had probably cracked their shin on it numerous times, and cursed it, and wished they’d never bought it. They knew it was busted and wanted to get rid of it, hence the twenty-five buck lowball. They still thought they were taking advantage of me, I imagine, because they based her assessment of its bustedness on the shop’s ability to fix it, not mine.
My portion of the asymmetry was a form of educated guess. It’s hard to refinish a chair like this. It has a lot of metal parts. There’s a tilting mechanism under the seat, with a big screw dial and hefty springs to tighten or loosen the amount of sproing in the tilt. There chair seat has a big, threaded rod that allowed you to spin a heavy metal plate to adjust the height. It was seized, and held by a set screw, at its lowest possible adjustment. That’s why if felt like you were sitting on the floor when you plopped your brains on the seat.
There were four gussets between the four legs. They were the same wood, and nicely refinished like the rest of the chair, but they rattled around. One hung precariously on a simple brad hammered through a metal plate on the base of the chair legs.
So knowing what I know, I surmised that the owner-husband had taken it apart to refinish it, and couldn’t quite put it back together, and the owner-wife had been riding him over it. They were hoping for a payday, but had come a cropper, just wanted to be rid of the thing. It was a mute reminder of something unpleasant to both of them, and not something good.
It’s a common thing. Taking things apart to fix them and not being able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I know I’ve done it with things a lot bigger than a chair. A Toyota, for instance. Lots and lots of people in my neck of the woods watch a couple of teevee shows, buy whole houses, take them apart, and can’t figure out how to put them back together again, and eventually wander off. The next realtor helpfully mentions that all the hard work is done, it just needs some touches, and many of the materials are still onsite. The auctioneer who follows the realtor after they give up is usually of a more practical mind, and simply admits the place is gutted, and you have to clean it out.
So we plopped down the money, and I put it in the back of the car knowing one thing, and the owner went outside and took down the OPEN flag and kind of smirked at me, knowing another.
We got home, and I flipped the chair upside down, drove four self-tapping wood screws up through the plate that holds the swivel base legs together. Those are always the first thing to go missing when you take a chair like that apart, because they’re the first thing you remove. Since the metal plate wasn’t flexing anymore, I could (re)bang the tacks that held the wooden gussets in place. I used a flat blade screwdriver to release the heavy adjustment disc on the threaded center column and it spun easily to adjust the height. I hand-tightened the spring tilt assembly to avoid the feeling of scuba diving water entry when you tilted back. I plopped a cushion on the seat, and I’m sitting on it right now, typing this essay.
If you poke around online, you can find a find a fair approximation of the chair. Here’s one that’s almost identical. It’s 350 bucks.
The entire economy of the United States seems to be based on asymmetrical information at this point. You’re at a disadvantage in almost every transaction you could name. Well, I know I am, anyway, and I imagine there are plenty of people like me out there. Guys like Warren at the shirt company that doesn’t make shirts anymore based their whole career on the concept.
Everything on the internet spies on you all the time. Everyone in a position to fleece you knows everything about everything about you at this point. They know how much money you have, and what you’ve been browsing online (you really should have cleared the cache memory after looking at that girl wearing only a pillbox hat and steeply inclined shoes, gents), and where you drove, and what you bought at the supermarket five years ago. You’re fish in a barrel to someone like a bank manager with a gleam in his eye.
Your only hope is to wander into a place where no one knows you, and doesn’t know how much money you have in your pocket, or how badly you need an office chair like that one, or even that anyone still walking the earth could fix something as simple as a chair with machine-made parts.
Then all you have to do is stand still and let them take advantage of you. You know, for twenty-five bucks.
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