A row of joined chairs

One seat in every joined row goes unchosen longest, usually the one nearest the trash bin or the one that faces the reception desk too directly, and the pattern holds across buildings that have never shared a supplier. Thirty-one such rows were sat in over the course of study, in fourteen buildings, and in nine of them the avoided seat could be identified within the first ten minutes simply by which cushion looked least worn. The chairs themselves are joined at a shared steel frame beneath the fabric, a construction that transmits every shift of weight down the row, so that a restless child at one end can be felt, faintly, at the other. Armrests are fixed rather than shared, placed at the seams between seats, which means two people sitting adjacent must negotiate, silently, who gets to rest an elbow and who does not. The fabric wears first at the front edge of the cushion, where feet push off to stand, and last at the back, where almost nobody leans. Four of the thirty-one rows had a wobble in one seat that the others lacked, always traceable to a single loose bolt rather than a design flaw, fixable in principle with a wrench nobody on staff carries. The row holds its shape regardless of who sits where, which is either the whole point of joining chairs together or beside it entirely.

Beatrice Womack