The Chair

So every now and again you have to depart from the goofy world of sports and July is probably the best month to do that.  So I give you the story of the chair.  It wasn't just any old chair.  It was a chair given to me and my roommate Nick Meo during our senior year of college in the fall of 2000.

Yeah remember 2000?  Seems like just yesterday.  Everybody had just got rich off of that Y2K stuff.  I still to this day couldn't figure out why my alarm clock was supposed to stop working?  It didn't even keep track of that date.  Yep 2000, the year the world didn't stop, or slow down.  It was the year of the famous chair.

In a standard Carthage College dorm (For those of you who don't know it's a small school right on Lake Michigan in Kenosha Wisconsin and trust me that's all you need to know.) you get two beds two wooden desk and two dressers.  All these things are wooden and highly uncomfortable.  During my entire stay at Camp Carthage myself and my 5 different roommates had come up with all kinds of ways to improve on this small space and the furniture that came with it.

During our senior year Nick and I decided we needed a chair to replace the one I had had in my room the prior year.  A recliner that was key to the whole room setup.  Pressed to not spend any money Nick remembered his sister had such a chair that she no longer needed.  His sister lived in western Milwaukee or in the Suburbs to the west of it.  So we headed up to her place to grab this chair, which we thought would improve our dorm experience greatly.

We got there to find that the chair outwardly didn't look like the recliner Nick had described.  It was more of a classical styled chair.  Four wooden legs and I didn't believe that it would recline.  Yet, to my surprise it did recline and we loaded into my truck and returned to school

The chair was a touch awkward and did not break into two pieces.  This proved to be a problem because it would not fit through the doorway of our room.  We tried for what seemed like an hour to get the chair in twisting it every possible direction with little or no luck.  We sought advice from many of our floor mates and friends, but they were little help.

We asked the two Joe's who had lived together for over a 2 years what they thought.  One Joe, Joe B, refused to be involved.  He did not want to be responsible for breaking the chair and having to ask his Father, a carpenter by trade, to fix it if that were to happen.  He dismissed himself from the situation as he often did to go....well we never knew what he did, but that's a story for another day.

The other Joe, Joe B 2 (yes both roommates had the initials JB, there were also both diabetic, crazy right?) was a martial arts expert.  He tried to use his green belt skills to get the chair through the doorway, but no amount of karate kicks and right had thrusts would work.  He suddenly felt a lack of sugar in his body and excused himself to have a class of orange juice.

A third friend named Peter entered the fray.  He was a large kid who thought he knew his own strength.  Kind of like knowing the incredible Hulk, but without the muscles.  He tried with all his might to get the chair in, but his lack of muscle and strength was not helping.  He grew tired and headed off to get something to eat.

We then set out the advice of a man who had previously lived in the dorms for many years, Chip.  Chip had to have seen this situation many times, but he had graduated so we had to contact him via phone.  We gave him the dimensions of the chair, and the things we had previously tried.  The situation intrigued him, but he was also of no help.  We let him off the phone so he could go back to doing whatever it is he did.

It should be noted that we could have taking the door off the hinge, but Nick was insistent that the chair would go without having to do that despite my many protests to stop and do so.  Nick grew frustrated like an old man trying to return soup at a deli.  He mustered up his new found strength he had gained from his summer weight loss program, where he had lost 100 lbs. in less than three months, and smashed the chair into the room.

With the chair now in the room we celebrated, but something was amiss.  The chair seemed to have been damaged because when you sat in it swayed, but Nick not willing to admit that he had broken it, climbed into the chair.  There he stayed for almost 5 hours eventually passing out in the chair that he was so proud of.  Then suddenly during the night, despite caring a much lighter frame than the previous year, the chair gave way crashing into pieces.

Nick finally was willing to admit defeat, and the chair was going to have to be sent to the garbage, but we both agreed that the comedy could not end there.  We rigged the chair up for our fellow floor mates to try out and crash over in.  The hilarity of it all was endless, but as large groups gathered to watch the latest victim the charm wore off and the chair ended up in the dumpster.  Sad end to a great chair.