Alivia Zivich – on dot-com office chairs.

Los Angeles, California
July 28, 2000

Dear Paul,

I was really irritable yesterday and spent the day lashing out and writing angry emails. I feel silly today. My mood from yesterday is distilled, and I feel schizophrenic. Have you ever had your temperament swivel like an office chair? And in fact, hardy-har-har, office chair is all too appropriate a metaphor, since it was an office chair that was the partial stem of my irritability.

When I first began working at my office (I program at an uber-hip company that publishes online magazines) I was pleased to see the higher-ups were shelling out the dough so that everyone could have a beautiful Aeron office chair. The Aeron is, of course, the Porsche of the dot-com world, ergonomically designed by Herman Miller. I was told I would receive a chair as soon as funding came through to order more. The ETA for the chairs was one month after my arrival. In the meantime, recent hires had to make do with the kind of chairs usually seen in office lobbies: not terrible to look at, but certainly not meant for sitting on for anything longer than fifteen minutes.

Of course, this being a hip young company, things are “fluid” at best, and the chairs were not forthcoming. I am not a silent employee – I am not Milton from “Office Space” – so I set about complaining, in a totally appropriate manner. First I approached the office manager. She’s my age, twenty-four, perhaps a bit younger, and a big fan of indie-rock and oversized hooded sweatshirts. We get along well; I update her on my favorite TV shows, which she catches sometimes but not often enough. So about two months into the job, I talked to her about the chairs. She informed me, in her super-nice manner, that the thirty-something business types that run the company had decided that they didn’t want to spend $600 apiece on chairs, which is how much the Aerons cost. They wanted to spend about $200, so they were looking for new types of chairs. She said if they gave her the O.K., she’d just order me a chair, but as it is they have to approve that type of expenditure.

I realized what a sneaking, conniving ploy it was to hire her as office manager. How can I yell at her? She’s my age, she’s my friend, we’re in this job together.

So I moved on to my “direct supervisor.” Quotation marks are necessary because he too is my friend, and although he sometimes tells me what to do, it’s never in a bossy way; it’s more like a student-body president delegating duties. He also says I can leave whenever, and when I can’t get something to work quite right, he’s the first to say, “Oh well, who cares, go home and try again tomorrow.” So I talked to him and he talked to “them” and of course “they” said everyone would get the same kind of chair, to avoid evil glares and shanks in the back. It was just a matter of waiting until proper funding can come through.

So time passed, no word on chairs, but people started leaving the company – people who had Aeron chairs. I began to think, “I’ll definitely get a chair, I’m first in line!” because when I started, everyone except me had one. So our Manager of Information Systems (MIS) guy left, and I waited. The next night, when leaving work late, my boyfriend, my cool friendly supervisor, and I noticed that the MIS guy’s Aeron was now parked at the desk of a young blond CONTENT girl! The nerve of this girl, whose job consists of surfing the web, checking out promotional material, and listening to promo CDs in order to gather content for our sites, and who resembles an ugly Britney Spears, no less, to just TAKE that chair! AGH! I spent all night seething.

The next day I told on her to the office-manager girl, who rectified the sitch, and by mid-afternoon the chair had become mine. My ass, my legs, my back – all finally unwound. I was at ease. Finally the great chair fiasco was solved.

But for my boyfriend, who started working here just after I did, it had just begun. Soon thereafter another person with a chair left. My boyfriend took it, began sitting in it, and made a nameplate for it (which we must do to avoid having our chairs commandeered). The next day he informed the office manager that he had taken what was rightfully his. She said, very apologetically (she felt terrible), that she had promised the content girl she could have the next free chair because the content girl said she had a bad back. (Sure, that’s why she wears huge platform sandals.) My boyfriend is the suffering-in-silence type, so he surrendered his chair. He was promised the next one.

So today our cool boss is leaving to take a job in Chicago. On Monday, he had told my boyfriend to make sure to grab his chair when he left. My boyfriend replied that the office-manager girl had already emailed him that the chair would be his. We all smiled, relieved. It had been a long, arduous battle.

The next day, the office-manager girl emailed him again. The woman taking over for our cool boss, a web-site producer (i.e., acts like everyone’s boss) who sits on the other side of the building and happens to know a bit about HTML programming, had been making moves for the chair.

The cool boss and I plotted. My boyfriend, we decided, will take the chair on Friday, before cool boss leaves. He’ll quickly nameplate it, sit in it, adjust it, make it his.

Then, yesterday, Thursday, another email from the office-manager girl. A higher-up had decided the new woman will get the chair. Two other employees with chairs are leaving next week, so she asked that my boyfriend be patient for another week and get one of those.

It was just disgusting. If this is how they’re going to dole out chairs, why did they even pretend that it would happen on the basis of seniority?

My boyfriend and I went on a walk in the afternoon, and I began to cry. I began to think about how we programmers do the majority of the work on the sites, and yet producers and designers treat us like we work for them because they’re often in a position to tell us what needs to get done. And our only protector, our cool supervisor who knows more about web programming than anyone I’ve ever met, he was leaving us. We were cubs left to fend for ourselves against co-workers who know nothing, who fear us because of our know-how, and so treat us like lepers. It was too much.

The long walk helped, plus we found a bunch of old darkroom equipment someone was throwing out. We went back to work for a bit, then left about an hour early. My boyfriend decided he couldn’t care about it, that he’d get a chair eventually, and I felt I didn’t have to care as much if he wasn’t going to.

They’re serving pizza in the kitchen here at work, a going-away party for our cool boss and a few other people who are leaving, so I’m going to go eat. The one way in which we’re treated “right” is that we are constantly offered junk food. We’re all Hansels and Gretels!

Alivia