Chair!

Two months ago, I ordered a new office chair. There was nothing particularly wrong with my old office chair other than the hydraulics were just starting to fail under my exceptional weight and a small tear in the upholstery in the seat that wasn’t worth complaining about. But I spend a lot more time in my office chair lately than I ever have before, what with working from home and all, and the chair was at the least ten years old, since I had it at our house before this one. It’s possible that it’s considerably older than that; I simply don’t remember buying it.

And I’m grown, y’all, and I make grown-up money, so I decided if I was going to buy a new desk chair, and if I wanted it to last another ten years I was going to pay for the chair I wanted and not worry about it.

Enter Secret Labs. And today, this box showed up:

God, I need to dust my damn bookshelves and clean the carpet. Jesus. I swear I don’t live in filth, it just looks like it.

Anyway.

That box probably weighed fifty pounds holy shit. I thought “Nah, it couldn’t have been that much” and looked up the specs? The chair weighs eighty pounds. It’s rated for users up to 390 pounds, so I can get as fat as I want. The FedEx dude actually hiked the thing up onto one shoulder to get it to the house and then volunteered to put it inside for me (I saw him coming and opened the door, since I thought I’d have to sign for it) and holy shit am I glad he did because it would have been a damn struggle for me to get inside.

This is what I saw when I opened the box:

So, okay … don’t touch the backrest recline lever. I got you. Don’t need to be told twice. I don’t know why I’m not supposed to touch the backrest recline lever, but I’m not gonna argue with my brand-new chair.

I make fun of unboxing videos, but I should have made an unboxing video. I’ve never seen anything packaged like this. You’ve seen how hardware gets packaged in furniture before. This is the hardware in my chair:

That’s a plastic branded sleeve around custom-cut foam, and we’ll get to the screwdriver in a bit. But back to that lever I’m not supposed to touch. The very top thing in the box was the chair back, and after removing that I was greeted with this sight:

Ok, dawg, I got you. Don’t touch the backrest recline lever. I took the seat out of the box and took the plastic wrap off of it:

That lever I’m not supposed to touch is underneath this cardboard strap which is glued shut and tightly wrapped around the seat, making it impossible to actually touch the lever.

I put the casters on the legs and attached the back to the seat. This was strongly suggested to be a two-person job but I really didn’t have any trouble with it. Then I took a deep breath and very carefully took off the cardboard strap around the Lever of No Touchy-Touchy. And saw this:

It is so important that this lever not be touched that 1) the box tells you not to touch the lever; 2) the plastic wrap around the seat tells you not to touch the lever; 3) there is a cardboard strap under the plastic wrap that also protects the lever, and then the lever is secured in place by a frightening red screw.

Back to that box of accessories. That screwdriver in there? The screwdriver that is not only custom-made and branded with the SecretLabs logo but is magnetic so that the single screw bit in there satisfyingly snaps into place when you attach it?

That screwdriver’s sole purpose is to remove the red screw.

I am hoping and praying that this thing fits standard screw bits, because if it does I’m keeping it forever.

It served its purpose:

The Lever of Doom is there so that you can recline the seat back, which I’m actually not going to do all that often. It reclines to damn near flat, which seems … maybe not advisable, given how centers of gravity work? I dunno. They seem to think it’s okay to sleep in this chair but I don’t see myself doing it that often.

You guys may remember that I used to sell furniture for a living. Furniture, as you know, is frequently made of wood, and is made, one way or another, far away from the place where we sell it, which is also kinda far from your house. So packaging of furniture is kind of a big deal, and a frequent gripe of furniture salesmen is that if these companies spent $5 more per box on packaging, they’d save thousands of dollars a year on damages. We had pieces that were packaged so poorly that I’d warn people we’d probably have to order them two or three times to get one with no damage, just because of bumps during travel. It’s not the furniture’s fault! It’s the shitty packaging.

This is the inside of the box after I took everything out. I could have drop-kicked this box down a flight of stairs and there would not have been the slightest damage to the contents.

This is not showing the several other foam blocks and sheets of foam that were scattered around my living room by this point. There was a piece of foam in there that was specifically cut to set the chair on while putting it together. It was in the instructions to do that.

Anyway, I finished putting it together:

And here it is in the office:

And a back view, just because:

Gotta love new toys.