#22: I have an archenemy and it is not who you think it is
They can be seen at churches and restaurants and they defy my will to sit in peace. The cheap plastic chair (CPC) is out to get me.
This week’s entry probably doesn’t fit neatly into my dad stories theme. It’s not a story about fatherhood but rather a story about the most iconic piece of furniture the world has ever seen. It’s an essay I’ve looked forward to writing for a few years now. This is the story of my antagonist, the thing that has tried to kill me more times than I can count. This is the story of the cheap plastic chair.
3 years ago I had the good fortune to travel to Kenya for the second time in my global health career. Kenya is a wonderful place. The people are warm and friendly. The beaches are pleasant with sunsets that are something off of a postcard. But getting there from Seattle (where I live now) is a challenge. There’s a redeye flight from Seattle to Amsterdam, a 9 hour layover, then another redeye flight. You land sort of disoriented, not knowing what day it is, or what continent you’re on. All you know is you’re tired, hungry, and ready to relax for a bit.
But when you’re on a work trip like this and it takes 2 full days to get there, there’s no time to chill. I would have to hustle (actually there’s no hustling in Nairobi traffic) to my hotel, shower up, then head back to the airport to wait around for a few hours. You catch another flight, this time to the coast, then you get into a car and drive the 2 hours to a rural village. At this point you’re on hour 30 of near continuous travel. Space and time start to converge on you like you’re heading into one of the wormholes from the movie Interstellar. You’re not entirely sure if you’re going forwards or backwards in time. All you know is you have a bit of tunnel vision as you walk into a school to brief about 50 lead teachers (the equivalent of high school principals) on how to use the software your company built. But you’re so delirious that you’re not sure if you’re going to talk about software or your favorite Ben Affleck movie. Everything is a blur.
That is until you walk into the classroom and you feel like you’ve been jettisoned out of the other end of that wormhole, wide awake and painfully aware of what lies before you. It is not having to debrief a room full of people smarter than you that is haunting. Nor is it the suspiciously warm piece of fish you ate at a roadside “cafe” on the roadtrip that causes you concern.
It is the cheap plastic chair that they are motioning for you to sit in that causes your eyes to narrow, your senses to heighten, your teeth to clench, and your butt to pucker up just a little (it’s true). Let me explain.
The Cheap Plastic Chair (CPC)
These cheap stackable chairs are the most ubiquitous piece of furniture on planet Earth. You can find them in church basements, schools in rural Kenya, hot dog stands at little league ballparks, at a fire pit on the hood canal, Russian cafeterias, Australian surf shops, etc, etc. They’re cheap and by my estimation, there are approximately 6 trillion of them in circulation around the planet (I made that up. But it feels right).
I don’t hate them because they are inexpensive or because they are insanely uncomfortable or because the idea of eating Jellied Pork at a Russian Cafeteria while I sit in one of these chairs makes me wanna barf. No. I hate these chairs because they are specifically designed to collapse under the weight of any man, woman, or child who weighs more than 240 pounds. I know because I have been a man of at least 240 pounds for the past 25 years and I have shattered, squashed, and destroyed many of these chairs.
The first time
I was in my late teens. I don’t remember the exact date or time. But I do remember that I was recently the beneficiary of the freshman 20 (errr 30? 40?). The endless supply of Papa Johns Pizza combined with a newfound love of Strawberry Daiquiris means that I had gone from “husky but athletic” (as my mom called me) to a full on fat boy. I mean, it happens you guys. I’d gotten real chubby.
Anyway, I was somewhere, sometime, looking for a place to sit. I plopped down into a CPC. It exploded on contact. The chair didn’t bend or quickly start to give like Donald Trump trying to negotiate anything with anyone, it full on exploded. The legs gave out and my tubby ass went right along with it. I looked at the chair as if to say “how…how dare you give out on me like that”. That was my first time. But it would not be the last.
Over the next 20 or so years, I would encounter CPCs countless times and with each rendezvous I would look at it more suspiciously than the last time. On at least two other occasions, the chairs gave out on me again. One time was another epic collapse and the last time, a number of years back, I was sitting peacefully in what I thought was a battle hardened chair. A new breed. But I started to feel the legs buckle and it too broke. I was demoralized. These chairs were not for me.
I’m not a materials engineer but…
I wanna be clear with y’all. I have zero professional training in materials design or engineering. But hey, I went to an engineering college and was friends with a lot of people who were good at calculus (I majored in management which is good for basically nothing). But look at the back of the chair. It sits too low for a person over 5’7! You put too much pressure on the back which forces it bend unnaturally. This causes two problems:
The back bows in jabbing you in the back. Have you ever had 13 Jim Beam and Cokes and then had plastic jabbing you in the back? Neither have I but I’ve heard it’s not comfortable
It applies undo pressure on them skinny legs. Imagine Pee Wee Herman’s skinny lower body but with the upper body of John Candy. The knees will get weak man. So weak
This clear design flaw means it’s not my heft or the fact that I’m a plopper that caused the chair to fail! It was always going to fail!!
(*attorney disclaimer: I am not an engineer nor do I know what I’m talking about so if you want to sue me for slandering the inventor of this magical chair, I would like to apologize right now).
Which brings us back to Kenya
When I walked into the classroom, all the lovely Kenyan faces turned to look at me trying to figure out who this disheveled, nervous looking American was. But I could not see them. All I could see was the dreaded chair. The chair that had folded on me several times before. Would it fold on me here, 9,000 miles from home? When I was supposed to be putting my best foot forward, representing my company and doing my best to assist them in distributing life saving medicine to adorable little children in their villages. Would the chair give out on me?! WOULD I FLOP IN FRONT OF ALL OF THEM?
When I closed in on the chair, I noticed there were 3 or 4 to choose from. I angled my way to the front of the line (when you travel anywhere in Africa on Ministry of Health business, you travel in a pod of like 10 different random people). I quickly assessed the situation. 2 of the chairs were clearly ready to go bust. But one chair. One chair looked promising. It was brand new, a sparkling white as if it had rolled off the manufacturing line 30 minutes ago. I moved closer to the chair and gently, carefully, SLOWLY lowered my ass into position. It gave a little. But not much.
Over the next 3 hours, I clenched my quads so tight as if I were sitting against the wall doing “chairs”, borderline hovering over the chair wondering if this thing could handle my heft. I even had to eat “lunch” from this chair, delicately cracking a hardboiled egg that they had given me, hoping that the jostling wasn’t sending unneeded tremors into the chair looking for a crack, a fissure of some kind to set off another catastrophe.
Thankfully the chair did not give in on me. I survived the ordeal. I did not thoroughly embarrass myself (this time). I completed the training, the lead teachers departed back to their villages and schools, and successfully administered their medicines to the sweet little kids.
But every time I see a CPC, I curse it silently, then say a small little prayer, then settle into it hoping it can tolerate me.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, on the coast in Kilifi District from 1983 to 1985. Great place. That is either a samosa or Kenyan donut. Chair in Swahili is kiti.
Ummm...we have these chairs in our backyard. They are green. Some have broken under the weight of someone larger than you. But a few still remain.