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.
11 Responses
Our local grocery store had apparently purchased some boneless legs of lamb a good while ago, and then forgot to put them out for whatever holiday for which people eat legs of lamb. The end result was that “previously frozen” boneless legs of lamb ended up in the meat section of the store for $0.99/pound.
We bought four of them averaging about 5 pounds each for twenty bucks…which cleaned out the entire lot of them. I have no idea why they weren’t snarfed up before we got there, but there they were. We threw 3 of them them into our freezer and ate the first one that night. Delicious. We just thawed out our second one, a 6-pounder (price tag said $5.94) and had that tonight with rice/wild rice and a salad. We’ll be eating from the leftovers all week.
Yet another perfect example of “asymmetrical information”,, that nobody knew that a leg of lamb probably shouldn’t sell for a buck a pound today, previously frozen or not.
Congratulations on your new chair! May it support your writing butt in comfort for many years to come.
Hi Blackwing- Thanks for reading and commenting.
I have put out the money for “the best desk chair” on several occasions. DH sits at his desk many hours a day and I want so much for him to be comfortable. The last one was $500 He doesn’t seem to impressed by the chair–the loving heart yes, but the chair. . .meh.
I used one of his old unusable chairs for my desk for years–Gads it was awful. Finally, went into my local sewing machine shop. The owner was retiring and getting rid of everything–including the well worn special “sewing” chairs, most likely to have been designed for women. Filthy upholstery but it fits wonderful! The guy nicked me $200 but it feels so good . . .
Hi Anne- Thanks for reading and commenting.
I would have paid much, much more for a chair I wanted to sit in for long periods. The problem was not how much the final one might cost, but how much money we might blow trying one “ergonomic” chair after another. All the spaceship chairs they have now are designed to look like they would be comfortable and sturdy, but they’re not. It’s really hard to buy chairs nowadays. The manufacturers have lost the touch. I’m not surprised you had to repurpose a chair to get a good one, and pay real money for it. They’re hard to find.
Ohh, I forgot to mention the chair mat.
Heavy pure glass chairmat–that was another great idea! I refused to tolerate those plastic chair mats from Staples for another minute. Rolling between my desk and my sewing table was like driving downstream on a dry creek bed! Rolling between the desk and my sewing table feels so god on that glass mat! It feels wonderfully smooth like on ice skates. Yep–I can push off from one desk and roll right off the entire mat easy peasy! Then of course I have to get up and lift the chair back on to the glass mat facing the correct desk/table. You see the problem with those glass chair mats is the right size costs a lot more than the small one I could afford. I needed one the size of the whole ice pond–not just a little frozen over puddle!
This skating mat is also great fun when you are sitting down in my chair and trying to pull on your socks–whee baby–that’s a fun ride! Same as falling on your butt when skating on real ice! Hurts about the same! Then you have to crawl over to some stationery table to get some leverage to hold on to in order to pull yourself up, because you know– those socks on glass are slippery as blades!
The second time I whacked my head on the floor or the shelf behind because I’d managed to tip over an office chair was the last time I had one of the “4-caster” variety in regular use. I’ve managed to banish the one we had at home, prevent more from being acquired, and even relegate the ones at work to storage or other departments.
Perhaps I’m just clumsy, but just as the S.C. Johnson company rebuilt all of the 3-leg secretarial chairs (that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for their headquarters) to make them have 4 legs, I think that 4 on a swivel castered chair is still too few — for me at least.
Hi Douglas- Thanks for reading and commenting.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an interesting fellow, in a lot of different ways. His furniture designs were universally atrocious.
Herman Miller Aeron chairs seem less popular now than they were twenty-five years ago. I had one briefly at the office where I worked. After a couple of months, I realized that “Aeron” was an old German word for sandpaper. The supposed space age open mesh seat ruined several pair of pants before I realized what was going on.
Later, when I went back to working for myself, and found my back was killing me by the end of the day, I used funds from one of my first jobs to buy a Humanscale Freedom office chair. Back problem went away; I’m still sitting in it every day twenty years later. The chairs are several hundred dollars more now than they were in 2002. You can get reasonably good office chairs for about $200, but they don’t last…the arms get wobbly, the spring for the back support weakens, the fabric frays, the casters break. My Freedom chair is still in perfect working condition.
If you want to see for yourself what kind of JERK Frank Lloyd Wright actually was go to Falling Water. The design was all about his ego challenging the site. No one could have enjoyed the inside of that house. Oh, I know they claim to, but I doubt it!
My own version was with kitchen table chairs. One of which had a tetchy joint between leg and set, and no amount of shimming or gluing would tighten up the joint. One Saturday, on our morning constitutional, my wife and I spotted a yard sale with a set of 4 handsome and sturdy kitchen chairs selling for $100 (you go find a $25 chair, I dare ya!). I immediately claimed them, and told the seller (a neighbor just a block from my house) that I’d be back tout suite with the money and a bonus. Fast as we could, we returned with the cash AND our old set of chairs, donated to the yard sale. Voila! Replaced all the kitchen chairs with much sturdier ones for a mere C-note, AND got rid of the old ones. AND earned the esteem of my neighbor. An hour later we drove by the yard sale again, and our neighbor was happily selling those rickety old chairs to some asymmetrically uniformed fellow with a pickup truck.
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together!