TAKE A SEAT

It was challenging before I'd even sat down.

Let's leave out the fact that I chose to walk to work, just for a moment. And let's leave out how long it took and how far it was.

But let's leave in the fact that my chair was missing after me being away for a week! Vanished.

Monitor? Check. Docking station for my laptop? Check. Mouse mat and pile of previously-referenced assorted stuff? Check. But no chair. And no sign of chair. Oh and no-one in to ask what happened to it either.

Okay Matt. It's just a chair. Don't get grumpy. You can overcome this.

I wheeled over a spare one from an empty desk. I slotted it into place, then plumped my tired old self into the seat.

The seat gave way and plummeted my tired old self to the carpet.

No-one in to see that, thankfully. I pumped it up and tried again. It sank me back down with a characteristic swoosh of hydraulic air.

Sigh. Okay, it's not the end of the world. I grabbed the edge of the desk, pulled myself back up to normal height, and went in search of my actual chair.

It turns out that someone had borrowed it for a meeting and simply had forgotten to put it back.

For some reason, in offices, this kind of terrible crime is way up there with 'using someone else's favourite coffee mug' and 'CCing a VIP instead of putting them first in the To field of an email'. You can almost hear the guillotine being sharpened and the audible gasps of horror when these heinous things happen.

So the temptation was there for me too, to join in with the culture this morning. Should I rant against this great and terrible injustice? Should I go on an angry warpath, looking for an item to which I'm mildly more attached than many other similar items in the building?

Well... no. It. Is. A. Chair.

I took a deep breath and got over it. Then I wheeled another one over, sat down (reasonably comfortably) and switched on my laptop.

It was about then that I realised that my mug was missing.