This is not my chair (see photo on right). 
I AM sitting in a chair (about to roll down a hill – a story I will explain below) but it’s a different chair.
My chair, which I bought in 1998, was in honor of my move from commercial advertising (back then I just said New Media), in which I and everyone @radical.media were treated with the best of the best.
Catered lunches.
First class flights.
And, at the time, the crème de la crème of butt-support: a Herman Miller Aeron Chair. No New Media firm back then could be taken seriously unless the web sites they launched and the CD-Roms they burned were produced by employees supported by their “perfect marriage of performance and design” (to quote from their web site).
Entering the world of non-profits, beginning with Web Lab, I knew I was giving up the “gilded cage” many of us back on Hudson street came to enjoy. But I wasn’t going to give up my chair. I had a feeling I’d be sitting in chairs, typing away at computers, for the rest of my life. So an Aeron would be my armor, my exoskeleton, protecting me in the work place from techno-hazards.
When I moved to the West Village, right off 6th avenue, to start at Web Lab, I brought my new chair with me (new one I bought – I didn’t steal the one from @radical.media). It was the first desk I would use with my chair – and it has been with me every since.
Three years later I pushed it down the street to Broadway, across Spring street, to my new job, at Global Kids. We stayed there for many years but then moved north to east 23rd street. And I brought my chair with me.
In 2012 I left Global Kids to start work at the American Museum of Natural History. And the chair I sat in? You guessed it.
And not just at my first desk at the Museum, but also my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. (Yes, I had four different offices in my ~6 years here).
And whatever desk I was at, my chair supported me like an embracing teddy bear, providing the right guidance for my furiously typing hands, the right tap for my lower back, the right tension when I gently pushed back for a slight tilt.
And then a few weeks ago I began to pack up my office, getting ready for my next move. On a Sunday my family packed my chair into our car and we drove it home, storing it in the room my son once named, for a reason still unknown to us, as the “quiet room”. As I pushed it through the Museum halls towards the garage I traced its previous routes over two decades since our start together in the West Village, considering the arc of my career and the remarkable work we got to take on together.
Then, on Monday, I returned to work and arrived at my desk to find… my chair!
It turned out the chair brought home was my colleague’s from his neighboring desk.
Whoops!
So that photo above is me RETURNING the chair from my home, to my car, to drive it into the Museum this past weekend and then me, below, returning MY chair, after leaving the Museum, back up the hill to my apartment.
Welcome home chair!
I wonder where it will next take me.
