Back when I had a desk, I couldn’t stomach the thought of sitting on a soulless upholstered office chair from a big box business supplies store. As someone who has been dubbed “Pretentious As Heck,” I need something Important to sit on whilst browsing on the The Facebook and vegging out to links on Reddit (Fark, formerly). 

So I found myself at the St. Lawrence Antique Market on a Sunday afternoon. A horrible place. Lousy with agèd junk like postcards, licence plates, old lamps, and an endless amount of truly worthless detritus. Astonishingly these items were dotted with price tags. People actually paid for this stuff.

I puttered around until I spotted this circa 1930s secretary’s chair. It was made of sturdy maple and all the fittings were heavy steel. The castings were new, but otherwise, it was a true antique. I was intrigued. For some reason, I wasn’t digging the $50 price tag, so my a friend and I circled the market for a few minutes. We thoroughly discussed negotiation strategy, like we were taking on Khrushchev during the Bay Of Pigs.

“Let’s see if we can get him down ten dollars.”

Finally, I came back to ask about the chair. Before we could employ any of our strategems, the seller launched into a pretty epic story about the chair’s greatness. We nodded our heads for what seemed like 37 minutes before he closed with, “I suppose I could let it go for $40.”

That’s how I got this uncomfortable, yet gorgeous, office chair. I ditched it beside of my old apartment, and it was snapped up within minutes.