KD^3C^3 - 20260222 Wish I was there

Last September, the arms on my office chair started failing. The cushions were cracking, they wouldn’t adjust, just old. I started shopping for replacements, and someone on Reddit suggested calling the manufacturer about a warranty replacement. 

I figured it was a long shot because the chair about 5 years old. But I called Staples (where I bought it) and they looked up the purchase. I was 5 months out of warranty, but the helpful person said they could order replacements anyway as a courtesy. Cool!

I gave them my address, they gave me an order number I forgot to write down, and then I promptly forgot about it (thanks, brain).

About a month ago I remembered, after one of the chair arms was even worse (I had been keeping them together with duct tape.) the new arms had never showed up, but now I was even further outside the warranty and don’t have the replacement order number so I shrugged and moved on with my life. 

Last Friday, I get an ominous “your order is being shipped” email from fedex. No information about what the order is, and it doesn’t align with anything I bought recently (I had all of those tracked). FedEx promised it would get there tomorrow, then end of day, then today kept getting pushed back as it had a hard time finding me (not unusual, I live in The Woods). 

Today, I check the tracking and it is marked “delivered - left in the mailroom.”now you might not know this, but The Woods don’t have a mailroom. But some neighbors have a package box, so delivery drivers don’t have to make it up the murder roads around us. Maybe it’s there. 

Nope. Turns out “the mailroom” means wrapped in a trash bag next to the mailbox. Which I have to drive to. Courteous, I guess. 

I drag the box back and no surprise to you, since you read the start of the post, it’s the replacement arms I ordered back in September. Only 5 months later than expected. Cool. 

Well that’s mostly true. Also in the box is a packing slip. But the packing slip is for someone else’s order, a set of five casters for an office chair. The same kind of chair? I don’t know. But the address for this packing slip is somewhere in New England. Which is decidedly not anywhere near where I live. I hope they ended up getting their casters.

Then I had to figure out how to attach them. 

There were no instructions, so it was mostly a case of looking at how the existing arms were attached and trying to replicate that again. Each one was held on with a trio of bolts. I was kind of hoping for screws, because I know where a screwdriver is. But bolts was unexpected. Each bolt also had a hexagonal dimple in the top for a hex key, but all my ikea hex keys seem to have disappeared. While the most reasonable thing would have been to go looking for a socket set, or at least a wrench, I did the third or fourth most reasonable thing. I remembered that my pocket knife, which I mostly keep in my desk, so maybe it should be called a desk knife, was marketed as a multitool in the way that so many cheap folding knives are. There is a 3 inch ruler on one side, the push handle thing on the back can technically be a screwdriver, there’s a backwards facing blade for opening letters or whatever, and most importantly there’s a set of holes in the handle to serve as the illusion of a set of hexagonal wrenches. 

I don’t always do things the easiest way. I flipped the chair over and positioned it on a table so I could easily access the bolts on one side of the chair. Then I meticulously, also clumsily, used the hexagonal hole on the handle of the knife to unscrew each bolt. Don’t worry, the blade was closed, so the chance of cutting myself was very low. It probably would have been much easier to go find a real tool, but on the other hand, I was much more likely to finish if I did it right away. Any obstacle could kill all momentum. 

So I did it the harder way, and it still worked! I’m typing this from the same chair with new arms! Also, in a weird bit of synchronicity I was watching Merrily We Roll Along, the proshot of the recent broadway revival with Johnathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe. Which mirrors the day I was hand sewing a patch onto the seat of the same chair while watching the recent west end revival of Next to Normal. I guess proshot musicals are my chair fixing soundtrack.