Seat of Learning

We haven't bought a lot in the recent sales (and firesales). What we did buy was some new office chairs.

Karen needed a new one due to a broken wheel. A correctly fitting castor for a chair is, I suspect, high up in the list of low-value items that you want to buy to avoid the replacement of a much higher-value item (the whole chair) but the chances of doing so are inversely-proportional to the theoretical cost of the spare part.

The problem is exacerbated nowadays by the excessive cheapness of the "whole thing". We bought office chairs for the boys for about £30 - nice-looking faux-leather swivelling-and-titling ones. I have probably spent £100 in hourly-charged time looking for a spare wheel for Karen's chair. I think our solution is going to be to throw it away but keep the 4 remaining wheels for spares - that seems to be a reasonable approach !

So, the boys' chairs needed assembling. On the whole I was very impressed with the instructions. And the packing. And the lack of missingness of small parts.

It was a straightforward task, really. However, when I had finished Harry's and was tightening all the bolts, I tested the chair out. It seemed a little upright, and it didn't seem to tilt. No, it did have some tilt, but it only tilted forwards. Odd. Of course, I realised I had assembled it "back to front". Not an easy thing to do, you might think, especially as I had taken some trouble to match "front" with "front" markings.

This always seems to happen in DIY. You take great care to - say - measure the distance between 2 holes and make it dead level. Then, when you drill, the wall collapses making the hole 2inches wide and the whole exercise pointless. Or, you construct the object with precision only to find that one part had to be put in place at the very beginning.

In this case, the manufacturers had cleverly designed the whole kit to be symmetrical (so no need to fabricate different "Left" and "Right" arms. This meant it was possible to put the thing together more or less perfectly whilst still being inside out, so to speak.

The good news was that I had a second one to put together, so that the learn-by-doing exercise was not put entirely to waste.