My Chair

It was recently suggested to me by the loved ones I cohabitate with that it is time to replace my recliner.

If the chair looks over sized, that’s because it is. The last time we bought living room furniture, Susan specifically bought me a “big and tall” recliner from Mathis Brothers. Not only was it bigger and a little fluffier than a regular recliner, but it was (supposedly) built stronger and designed to hold more weight as well. We’ve had the recliner for about five years now and as you can see the chair did not hold up very well. In fact, the recliner held up much worse than the “non-big and tall” recliners we previously owned, which we paid $20 each for from a garage sale. The footrest on this chair is so messed up that it does not retract on its own; you have to manually pull the left side of the footrest back with your heel to close it. There are multiple rips on the internal fabric, and last week the back right hand side of the chair became completely disconnected, which means I now lean back at a 45 degree angle whether I want to or not. It would be different if the chair were at least comfortable but at this point most of the padding in the seat is gone, which means if you sit toward the front of the chair it’s like sitting on wood and your legs will go to sleep within minutes.

At the same time we bought the recliner we also bought a couch and a love seat, also from Mathis Brothers. Susan also bought the extended warranty, “just in case”. Within about two years, all the cushion seams had separated and you could see the foam inside the cushions no matter which way you turned them. When Susan attempted to have them fixed, and I wish I were kidding, that the warranty “only covered accidental rips and tears.” OUR tears, we were told, were due to a manufacturing flaw and would not be fixed. We paid around a thousand dollars for those two pieces of furniture (the chair was extra), and when we gave them away (I was too embarrassed by how bad they looked to try and sell them) I vowed we would never, ever shop at Mathis Brothers again.

So Friday night Susan went to Mathis Brothers and bought me a new recliner. Why did she go there? I have no idea; you’ll have to ask her. Personally, I’d rather sit on a pile of dead fish than a chair from Mathis Brothers, but that’s where she went. Susan is not very good and sticking to business boycotts. I once abstained from visiting a specific McDonald’s for a year because they kept putting the cheese on my burgers in the wrong order.

Susan likes Mathis Brothers because they have a large selection of furniture, and in no time at all she found a replacement chair. After paying for it Friday night, she was told the warehouse was closed and she would have to come back Saturday morning to pick it up. And so, Saturday morning after breakfast, the four of us along with my dad stopped by Mathis Brothers to pick up my new chair.

With receipt in hand, Susan entered the store to pick up the chair. At first she was told it would take ten minutes for someone from the warehouse to meet her. Ten minutes quickly turned into an hour. The problem was, they sold us a chair they did not have in stock. They offered Susan the floor model (at no discount), and Susan agreed to it — not really out of the niceness of her heart, but because (A) she doesn’t want my crappy old chair in the living room during Christmas, (B) she knows the old chair is uncomfortable to sit in, and (C) she doesn’t want me to bring in a wheelbarrow full of dead fish into the living room. To speed up the waiting process I took Mason and Morgan into the store and turned them loose. It worked; ten minutes after that, Susan and the kids were ushered out and told to go to the warehouse and pick up my new (floor model) chair.

The two geniuses you see here were tasked with retrieving and loading my chair into my truck. After another ten minutes or so, the two of them showed up with a chair, had Susan look it over … and then realized that it was the wrong chair. “Oh, dur,” one of them said. At this point Susan noted that it actually took us less time to buy the house we’re in now than it had taken to buy this stupid chair. As one of the workers left with the wrong chair, Susan informed them that they had about five minutes left before she blew her top. I was already mad and just tried my best to shut up.

Eventually, the right chair (which looked just like the wrong chair, except apparently it was a slightly different shade of brown) arrived and was loaded into the back of the truck.

Here are the two chairs together. Moments after this picture was taken, old chair was flipped over and searched for missing remotes and spare change before it was relocated out to the garage where it sits, waiting for big trash day.