July 28, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Take a Seat
Bill Nicolich: www.SQLFave.com.
Daily tweet of what's new and interesting: AppendNow
July 29, 2009 at 4:23 am
Your employer is duty bound by law to provide you with a chair thats appropriate otherwise you could suffer health problems and sue them.....:-D
Hiding under a desk from SSIS Implemenation Work :crazy:
July 29, 2009 at 5:29 am
Joel Spolsky provides a great justification for spending to get a high quality chair.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDevelopers.html
Get the chair ... you deserve it
July 29, 2009 at 5:36 am
At a prior job, I had a wonderfully comfortable $199 chair, but had to give it up when I went to management. The management chair was 3-4 times as expensive and felt like sitting on gravel. I fussed and fussed about that chair and should have just "lost" it one night.
Get what you think is comfortable. We spend too much time in the saddle to not be comfortable.
Regards,
J.
July 29, 2009 at 6:05 am
Buy a new chair??? With hundreds of companies going out of business and still more laying off workers, you are going out and buying a new chair? Man, I am guessing that you also have champagne every morning with your company-supplied caviar!!! :w00t:
In these times the best thing to do for this challenge is find a used office furniture company. Where I live, we have a very popular used office furniture company that I have dealt with for decades now. Great guy, started as a small one truck business buying up used office furniture, and today he has grown to five stores throughout our two-state region!
A couple years ago he sold me two italian leather hi-back office chairs. 100 bucks each!! Very comfortable for those late afternoon naps! Of course, I have never figured out the "Italian leather" part of things - didnt know leather came in nationalities, but then, great chairs - and I didnt overpay for junk like you get at places I wont mention (like Staples and Office Depot, which I just didnt mention)...
In these times you need to shop for bargains and in office furniture, there are tons out there to be had. So cancel this afternoon's massage and spa treatment and do a little local shopping - there are great deals to be had. 😎
July 29, 2009 at 6:36 am
When I started at my present job a year and a half ago, there was somewhat worn but still serviceable chair at my desk. "Replace that piece of crap," my new boss said, "get yourself something better." "Nah, it's fine," I replied, "it's comfortable if a bit ugly, but it works great. Why do I want to waste money to replace something that works OK?"
Move forward 6 months. I awake at night with a numb right arm, nearly immovable and unsensing from the bicep on down. Waving it around to restore pinched-off bloodflow does nothing, and I start wondering if this is some symptom of a heart attack. 10 minutes go by before I get much sensation at all, and the next day it's still not right.
I go to a doctor, a neurologist, etc., etc. I get thousands - yep, thousands! - of bucks of testing done before a doc with more brains than the rest starts grilling me about the timing of the onset of symptoms, after she explains I have a pinched nerve in my elbow. Had I noticed this earlier? Well, yes I had, in a milder form. When exactly? Well, several months before. What was going on in your life at that time? Uh, I started a new job and I ..... uh......
And it hit me. The old chair had unpadded, metal arms, and my natural position at the chair - with my elbow draped just off the edge of the chair's arm - put the inside of my elbow right against the thin, outside edge of the unpadded metal arm of the chair. DOH!
Bought a new chair immediately. Within 2 weeks, my arm was 80% better. Within 2 months, the tingling was virtually gone. As I sit and type this, my arm is fine.
Chairs matter. Better chairs could lower the total national health care budget! A better chair would have lowered my health care budget!!! 😀
I didn't spend a lot on my new chair, but you better believe I sat in every chair I considered purchasing and evaluated where my elbows would rest!
Yours,
Rich Mechaber
July 29, 2009 at 6:52 am
So cancel this afternoon's massage and spa treatment and do a little local shopping - there are great deals to be had.
Blandry: The spa treatment comment had me rolling. Thanks. I should explain the irony. About every morning all the IT folks including myself go help pull products out of our sweaty warehouse for half hour to an hour to fulfill orders. Around here, we're not exactly what you could call pampered prima donnas.
But I get it. In these tough economic times...
Every time you hear that intro, you know you're in for it. In these tough economic times, I maybe shouldn't complain about sitting on a glorified plank of wood all day. But then if I go out, buy a chair, that will stimulate the economy ever so slightly and maybe speed the recovery.
Bill Nicolich: www.SQLFave.com.
Daily tweet of what's new and interesting: AppendNow
July 29, 2009 at 7:12 am
The chair at my current job is the best desk chair I have ever used. It's a Highmark Modela. It's got a mesh back, a fabric base, and padded armrests. I think it cost around $500. I wish I had the wherewithal to get one like it for home. There I use an Office Depot economy chair that I have had to repair on several occasions over the years. My advice is don't skimp on your chair.
July 29, 2009 at 7:13 am
I have a chair too. I think it's blue. Yup, blue. Chairs aren't a big deal to me as long as they meet a certain minimum standard, and my standards aren't all that high. I'm 6' 4" so basically it has to be big enough and the arms can't be all ripped up and catching on stuff. I have found a blue one that works for me, so I'm good.
If you need a new chair I can't endorse the used market loudly enough. New office chairs are like sports cars, with a tremendous prestige value worked into the pricing and a precipitous value drop the moment it leaves the lot. There are lots of decent chairs out there pre-purchased by folks who are now out of business. Avail yourself of their sacrifice and give a good home to a good chair.
[font="Arial"]Are you lost daddy? I asked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.[/font]
- Ring Lardner
July 29, 2009 at 7:15 am
Remember when requesting your new chair to use the word 'ergonometric'. It's a good 25 cent word for 'scientifically designed to make you more productive at lesser cost'. That's not the textbook definition of the word, but it's the practical definition.
rmechaber has it right - a good chair can save thousands in medical bills in the future. And not only the chair - if your workstation is properly designed, it helps prevent carpal-tunnel and a host of other maladies.
Any manager needs to hear ROI whether it's a new chair or a new server. Lower medical bills and higher productivity come from something as simple as a good chair.
By the way boss, since we mentioned a new server...
___________________________________________________
“Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.”
July 29, 2009 at 7:20 am
I'd start with the criteria "How many ways can it be adjusted". If it can be properly adjusted for lumbar support, height, tilt, arms etc, etc, then you have a chance of making it comfortable.
Here it's almost a crime to adjust the chair when you use someone's desk as it takes so long to get it just right!
July 29, 2009 at 7:33 am
The way I buy a chair is by going to a store that sells them, and sitting for a few minutes in every one of them that looks even vaguely like it might be comfortable. I pick the ones that are the most comfortable, and sit there reading a book for a while. Salespeople sometimes stop by and ask what I'm doing, and I tell them I'm testing out the chairs. If they aren't happy with that, I'm happy with finding a different store, but that's only come up once.
It does you no good for me to tell you what I find comfortable to sit in. It has to be comfortable for you.
I've found that a half-hour in a chair is good enough to work out if it'll be comfortable enough for all day. Much less than that, and you're likely to miss something, like that it makes your legs go numb if you sit in it for half an hour.
Once I've found what I want, then I look at the pricetag, gasp, mutter under my breath about a few dollars of plastic and metal being sold for "how much!!!!?????!!!!!", and then buy it.
If I don't find one I like, or if the ones that are comfortable don't have the quality for a long use-life, I shop elsewhere.
Used office furniture stores are good. So is just about any place that sells chairs.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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July 29, 2009 at 7:40 am
Don't skimp on the chair. It's something that we do spend a significant amount of time in, and can either make life comfortable or miserable. Like other posters mentioned - make sure there are plenty of ways to adjust it; make sure to check out used office furniture stores (or at least go to see the new ones, find a model you like, and check for it online - Ebay, Craigslist, etc. - to see who is getting rid of a relatively new one).
There's one last thing. Once you get it, you'll have to make sure that it's easy enough to pack up and bring home with you every night - otherwise, you may continuously find it away from your desk!
July 29, 2009 at 7:51 am
Forget just the chair. You need an ergonomic work station. One that not only includes a chair, but also an appropriate desk, monitor stand, an articulating keyboard/mouse tray and an adjustable foot rest. One of my auxiliary duties at my company is evaluating workstations for deskbound employees and showing them how to adjust their workstations to alleviate neck, back, wrist, and leg stresses. As a young buck (judging by your picture) you may not appreciate this, but after several years, these stresses take their toll on our bodies. I've had carpal tunnel surgeries on both wrists and have a herniated disc in my back. A lot of back/neck/hip/knee problems stem from our activities outside work and are further aggravated sitting in front of a monitor for several hours a day.
Here's a link to get you started: http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/
Good Luck,
Steve Tahan
July 29, 2009 at 7:53 am
blandry (7/29/2009)
Buy a new chair??? With hundreds of companies going out of business and still more laying off workers, you are going out and buying a new chair?
... but think of all the poor chair salespeople who need those commissions from new chair sales so they can afford to get their kids the GI-Joe with the Kung-Fu grip! (OK, I've watched the movie Trading Places too many times in the past month)
Seriously, What I've found typically to be a bigger problem than the chair is the proper keyboard placement. Every place I've ever worked at either doesn't have keyboard trays so the keyboard is a bit too high sitting on the desk, or they have improperly placed keyboard trays that sit too low and you have to adjust the chair so it's sitting on the floor making the rest of me uncomfortable. Chairs haven't bothered me much.
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