Andrea Laurion last wrote about her job writing obituaries, and how she consequently ruined Christmas.

I was working away at my computer when the office manager came by my cubicle pushing a black office chair, wrapped in plastic. “Andrea, your new chair is in.”

I didn’t remember signing up for a new chair, but if she said I did, I’ll take it, though not before getting more information first. “Is it new new or new-to-me?” I asked.

“Brand new,” she said, sounding a bit surprised at my question. “It hasn’t even been unwrapped.”

I didn’t like being suspicious, but when it comes to office chairs and their newness, I had been burnt before at a previous place of employment.

One of my first jobs after college was at a mid-size cubicle farm with an office equipment problem. Functional chairs were hard to come by and there was a hierarchy when it came to the best ones. It took me six months to inherit a halfway decent chair from a former assistant manager. It wobbled a bit and threatened to flip over if I sat back too far, but at least it didn’t leave my back aching at the end of the day like my previous one. Not terrible, let’s be honest, still not that great.

When word got around that upper management ordered new chairs, it beat the weather as the go-to small talk starter. For months, colleagues with nothing in common used that topic as a way to connect with each other while they stood around waiting for coffee brew or their turn to use the microwave.

“I can’t wait for the new chairs to get here.”

“Oh, I know, they’re going to be sooo nice.”

“I’m counting down the days when I can get rid of my old chair.”

“Same here. Mine has a weird smell and it just sucks.”

“All the chairs here suck. That’s why they’re getting new ones.”

“It’s about time. I can’t believe I’ve had the same chair for three years.”

Never underestimate the power of boring people to talk dull subjects to death. These chairs should have shot us into space and massaged our feet at the same time as much as people talked about them. The fact that upper management never provided any details, mentioning at the end of meetings that the chairs would be here soon with no definite date of arrival, kept the conversation going for much longer than necessary.

The job itself was tedious and not at all what I wanted to be doing with my life. I worried that if I didn’t get out soon that the ongoing saga of office supplies would take up far more of my time than it deserved.

As life tends to go, these mythical chairs finally showed up after I put in my two weeks notice, when I only had a week left at the company. An announcement was made for all employees who signed up for new chairs to meet outside the second floor break room for a demonstration on how to use them. Even if I only had a few days left, I wasn’t going to pass up a nicer chair. I owed my butt at least five days of decent sitting time.

Outside the break room was crowd of about thirty business-casually clad professionals standing around in a half circle. A few were holding coffee mugs while others chatted politely. A mustached man in jeans and a t-shirt stood in the center next to a chair, waiting for the last stragglers to show up.

“Everyone here?” he said, not waiting for an answer.

The guy who delivered the shipment clearly had no patience for pasty, soft-handed office workers and their need to be ‘demonstrated’ on how to work a chair.

“Alright,” he said, taking a seat, grabbing different levers. “This makes it go up, this makes it go down, this makes it go back and this makes it go forward. Easy.”

He stood up and looked out at the crowd. “Anyone want to show the rest of us how it’s done?”

Silence. This was not a group of people who would volunteer to draw attention to themselves.

“OH-KAY. Come on. It’s not going to hurt and it’s not that hard.” He had enough of us. The look on his face revealed how he really felt: You pathetic wimps sit on your asses all day and you can’t even operate your damn chairs.

I might be a pathetic wimp, but if a childhood of watching Nickelodeon and reading The Baby-sitters Club books prepared me for anything, it was to sit on my ass, and I’ll be damned if some guy is going to me make me feel even more of an idiot about it. I knew with this bunch I would have to be the bold one.

“I’ll do it,” I said, stepping forward and sitting in the chair. “This makes it go up, this makes it go down, this makes it go-“

Before I could continue, the president of the company broke through the crowd, making her way toward me.

“Okay, alright,” she said, waving me out of the chair. “Stop messing around and trying to be funny and let him show us to how use them.”

The president always took the elevator the one floor up to the break room, a trip that took longer than walking up the single flight of stairs, making her the last one to arrive for meetings and parties. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she was late to this demonstration, but I was indignant over getting disciplined for this.

“He asked someone to demonstrate!” I protested. “And no one else would do it.”

A few of my coworkers came to my defense and backed up my claims, but it didn’t matter.

“Well, I’m sure there are people who could need to see the demonstration done over again,” she said. “So let him do it.”

For the second time, the poor dude had to go through the motions of chair dynamics. I felt bad for him, but not as bad as I felt for myself. Have you ever been yelled at for sitting in a chair? I didn’t think so.

At least I had the new chair. I was on the list, no one could deny that. I grabbed the nearest one and wheeled it back to the cozy sanctuary of my carpeted-walled cubicle.

It wasn’t until I was back at my desk that I noticed it. Scuffle marks on the wheels, wear and tear on the arms and worst of all, stains all over the seat–these weren’t new new, they were new-to-us. These were chairs the company scored only after another office was done using them.

I called over one of my coworkers to revel in this discovery with me. Her lack of surprise was disappointing.

“Mine looks about the same,” she said.

“These chairs aren’t new! They’ve been calling them new for so long but they’re really old.”

My coworker had been working much longer than I had and was used to shenanigans like this. She shrugged, told me to “hang in there,” and went back to her work, leaving me alone with a stained seat and smoldering injustice. The pettiness of office politics had finally succeeded in taking over my brain power.

Look, I like secondhand shopping as much as the next young, broke person. All of my furniture was either free from friends or scored at auctions sales. I have no problem publicly admitting that half my wardrobe was purchased at consignment shops. Hell, I used to do a weekly blog column called “Mining Monday” where I would document the best and worst secondhand stuff, from gorgeous vintage clothing to used toilet seats to a lifesize cut-out of Billy Dee Williams selling Colt 4. However, let’s be clear, just because I buy something at a thrift store that I’ve never owned before doesn’t mean someone else didn’t own it before me. This makes it OLD, not NEW. There’s no getting around that. New and used cars are not interchangeable, and neither are office chairs when it looks like someone shit themselves on it.

I wheeled the new chair into an abandoned corner and I sat in my old one the rest of my time working there. It was disappointing, but at least I was pretty sure the previous owners kept their bowels to themselves.