RED EXECUTIVE SWIVEL CHAIR c. 1976

This week marks yet another major change in my life. My favorite office chair lost the last of the replacement rolling castors and is now junked and waiting to be cast off at the dump. Why?
This is like losing a favorite pet, or a relative (well maybe not that bad).

The topic chair was the purchase for my lifetime when I was self-employed, has remolded the office and conference area in a north-side Chicago townhouse. With precious savings I found a great desk and invested mega bucks in two essentials: a IBM Selectric typewriter and a red, upholstered, American Seating ‘Judges’ chair with swivel and tilt with a chrome frame, custom ordered in a bright red upholstery. I will not repeat how much I paid for that luxury. At last, my own office, a work center, for the first time a typewriter with corrective-tape. I remember when Barbara Walters had a new office with a red typewriter and in my new found business venture I too would have an executive office.
Mind you I had not yet heard of a word processor, this was a decade before I met DH and got his hand-me-down computers. And the notion that someday I would be doing Digital Scrapbooking and have an iPod/touch with Apps was beyond imaging. But through it all I had the red-swivel chair where I planned, thought, typed, outlined, prepared reports and of course, did monthly billing ($$). How could I manage without it?
The Chicago townhouse went some years later after a divorce settlement, the conference table became a garage worktable in a NJ house; time came when you could not GIVE away an IBM typewriter (all antiques now), but the chair stayed with me. I now have a work-center with a Dell work station, a flat monitor and ports of every shape and size for inputs (or outputs?), and more software than is worth mentioning here. But the red chair was the mainstay of the office.
Several months ago one of the four castors on the red chair broke, split right in two. Fortunately DH found a sack with five ball-castors in his mega-shop-system and replaced all four with one extra. About a month ago one of the replacements also split in two and the LAST castor was used. No more spares, this is it. Over the weekend, still another castor split – this is a message from the gods of office furniture: the TIME has come to dump this chair. Ugh! No, not my favorite chair. Does this mean my executive days are over?
Who am I kidding my executive days have been over for more than fifteen years, but I in retirement the chair was a lingering vestige of my professional working days. No more, the chair is kaput!
But I am not completely out of seating – made a dash to the UNC Surplus Warehouse this morning and found a nearly-new, deep blue, swivel- tilt office chair; slimmer in scale and without the chrome shine. Perhaps more ergonomically comfortable, it is a sensible solution and all for the outrageous sum of $10.

Am I blessed or what? bb