Dear Office Chair,

You are the reason we are all so fat. I hate to lay blame, but I’m afraid that in your case, it is more than deserved. As far as I can tell, you have three main faces; your office face, your comfort face, and your fat-enabler face.

Your office face is what we see most often. Be it in movies, on TV, or in real life, we cannot help but be offended by your presence in a cubicled room of mildly smart-casually dressed, depressed humans. You come in a range of colours and fabrics that suit the different levels of corporate life. There is plastic, for the students and design-conscious, scratchy polyester fibres for the shit-kickers, more of the same for middle and upper management and leather for the executives.

Underneath this marker of status (with the exception of the plastic) is an indefinable stuffing. This stuffing exists for two reasons. One is to provide ‘comfort’ to the seated human. Both back and buttock are softly lulled into a hunched position, invariably before a computer and/or blank cubicle wall made of the same material upon which the human sits. The second reason is much more sinister. It disguises the fact that directly under the buttock and thus internal workings of the human you hold a weapon of fatal potential. Consisting mainly of springs, gears and a sliding barrel, this is also referred to as the ‘stand’. Said stand is precariously balanced on a spray of wheeled fingers. This concealed weapon has proven to be dangerous in the past, and the stand upon which it rests is prone to breakage, fallage, and of course, extreme embarrassment for the human who fell.

Which leads to your last face. Your most devious face. I mentioned previously that you are maintained on a bed of wheels. These wheels are a double-edged sword. They provide an excuse for any human sitting on you, Office Chair, to never leave you. In fact, the humans can be seen gliding from photocopier to cubicle, to manager’s office to colleague’s cubicle without a care in the world because you have trapped them so utterly in your (mostly) polyester clutches. The most important place you draw your humans to though, is the food receptacles. Be it fridges, vending machines or strategically placed lolly-jars, you force your human to gorge themselves, growing wider and wider in girth until your wheels snap and you provide the embarrassment that is a direct result of your comfortable fat-enabling.

I loathe you, Office Chair. You hunch me over and blobbify me even as I write, yet I fear leaving you at risk of the shotgun beneath me exploding into my body. I loathe you, Office Chair, but I fear you more. For the things you have done to my fellow humans, for the things you will no doubt do to me, I smite you with this gauntlet, Office Chair, in the hopes that you let at least some of us live!

Adrik