Yesterday Joan was reading a furniture brochure that came in the mail. She was looking at Stickley design furniture and mentioned that it was too bad one couldn’t buy a traditional four-legged office swivel chair anymore ( I didn’t ask why she was ruminating on the subject).
I thought about that for a bit and then went to my office and looked at the four-legged wooden office swivel chair, now in use without incident these past twenty years. Suddenly it occurred to me that the absence of four-legged swivel chairs must have something to do with OSHA, that all-pervading arm of the United Nanny States. I googled five-legged chairs, and sure enough, OSHA has written standards for all sorts of workplace chairs, and the four-legged swivel chair is now verboten.
I have to be careful in criticizing OSHA because in my youth I did all sorts of work that could have been a bit more safety oriented. But, safety standards for a common chair? Now, I can see the sense of outlawing a three-legged chair as dangerous, but even at that, I have sat on three legged milk stools without incurring injury (at least not from the stool, but beware of the cow).
By the way, that OSHA designed office chair must also have casters to roll about on, so one can get close to one’s desk without straining any muscles (I kid you not, that is in the literature). Well, I thought, if OSHA says it must be five legs, I guess that’s it.
But then, my mind being as fertile as it is, I began to have pesky thoughts and images of just how a four legged swivel chair might be dangerous, and I concede it could indeed be, under given circumstances, such as:
- Putting one’s feet up on the desk, like a wiseass kid boss (danger of tipping backward and knocking about the few brains that might be present).
- Falling asleep while in an unbalanced position, and tipping over the chair.
- Overreaching for the last donut in the box and falling (the fifth leg would have provided outrigger capability, particularly important when lifting heavy bakery like those huge, oh-so-cool $14 organic muffins).
- The four-legged chair becoming unbalanced with the added weight of an office pool secretary added to one knee. The threat of a double law suit therein; personal injury and sexual harassment.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Suffice it to say that OSHA has entered heavy intellectual seas here, as the chair has been a topic of philosophical discussion ever since Plato and Aristotle and on down to Stickley.
I have been wondering whether OSHA created the five-legged chair through lengthy analysis of four-legged chair accidents, or because someone on staff did not have enough to do one day? However, that is akin to pondering evolution versus intelligent design, and perhaps in the case of OSHA the latter might be an oxymoron.
It would be interesting, though, for some bureaucratic office to undertake a full study of the evolution of the chair, from simple rock or stump, on through the thrones of kings, bureaucrats and other tyrants; from three-legged to four-legged to five-legged chairs, complete with a search for missing links, and projections of future evolutionary trends (the six-legged chair…the octi-chair)
In any case, I guess we should thank the federal government and its strong right arm OSHA for making our lives ever-so-safe. As long as we stay firmly ensconced in our five-legged chairs.
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