The back fell off my desk chair. Thankfully I did not go with it. The departure of the top from the bottom was a moderately gradual process but when the moment came it was a surprise.

The desk chair that I have is a replacement for the one that I got a little over a year ago. It is a goofy looking thing designed to keep desk-slumpers from slumping. It has done a good job keeping me sitting straight up which is a good thing since the chair now has no back. Every once in a while I roll back a bit from my desk and start to lean back to think. What I think is I better lean forward really fast because there is no back to which I have started leaning. So far I have avoided toppling over but my stomach muscles are getting a workout.

As odd as it looks, I like my chair a lot. Desk chairs are very personal things and what works for one person may well not work for another. If you have any doubts about this, go online and look at desk chairs. Tonight there were over 6,000 listings for office chairs on ebay. Of course, many of those will be the same style but dropping by Amazon.com provides a sobering bit of information, there are over 11,000 desk chairs listed there.  A trip to an office box store yields more data. I have always wanted to go from chair to chair across the wide expanse of chairs spinning one turn in each chair and using the centrifugal force build up veritably fly to the next chair and my next spin. I resist the urge. I am not sure whether it is my grown-up decorum that says we don’t play with furniture in the store or if it is my desire to avoid depositing my lunch on the floor.

I am pretty certain there is a lesson imbedded in the office chair. I am not quite sure what that lesson is.

Perhaps the lesson is that we have an ever increasing number and styles of desk chairs because people spend more and more time at desks. The couch potato of the 1980s is now the desk potato. The origin of the term seems to be from the 1970s and stemmed from a turn of phrase on the word “tuber” as in someone who watched the tube. Tuber was applied to the tuberous potato. Or so the story goes. My bet is on potato chips as the imputes for the term.

With all of the interesting things to do on a computer, for adults and children, the solitary activities where her the television left off. My computer is also a television but I don’t even know how the television function hooks up.

In my mind it raises the question as to whether I am still a desk potato because I spend so much time in front of a computer or if I have been transformed by the physical requirements posed by my slump-preventing chair without a back.