Hi, my name’s Bobby Goode and I’ve been designing chairs for 4 years professionally. I have a B.Sc. (third class) in Chair Studies and I’ve been sitting on chairs for at least 10 years, so I think it’s fair to say I know an awful lot about making chairs. Although most of the chairs I’ve worked on have not been received well in chair magazines, this is because I’ve not had the chance to make the sort of chair that I want to make – usually my original vision for the chair is sound, but budget and time constraints (as well as meddling clients) result in the chair being broken. However, all that was set to change when we secured our latest contract and I was placed in full control of the chair.

Strangely, things didn’t go very well. The award-winning team of upholstery manufacture got a bit pissed off. “Make me some upholstery for my chair!” I asked them. “Okay, what do you want it to look like?” they inquired. This seemed like a curious question. “Well, obviously I don’t know that yet”, I said, “but if you just make it now, we can deal with those sorts of specifics later.”

They sighed and then asked, “What dimensions do you want it, and do you have some sort of template spec’ed out?” I was beginning to doubt the calibre of this upholstery team.

I split the carpenters into four teams - one for each leg - in order to streamline the production process. When they each asked individually for plans of what the legs should look like, I stressed that they should look “awesome”, and since they were the carpenters shouldn’t they be dealing with those sort of decisions? Amateurs.

Two weeks later, I received the completed legs - everyone thought that they were brilliant! One was beautifully crafted aluminium, in a very stylish modern design I thought. Another was gorgeous polished mahogany, and it had little carvings all the way up it. It was pretty big as well, that leg, so team 2 was definitely winning at that point. Legs three and four were bronze and fibreglass respectively. I thought the bronze one was pretty funny as it was only three inches long! This is going to be the best chair ever!

A week before the deadline for this chair I had fifty e-mails waiting in my in-box from the (frankly rubbish) upholstery team. They were demanding to know all sorts of ridiculous things about the fabric, so I decided to put my foot down and tell them just to bloody well get on with it, as the pressure for the completed chair was beginning to rise. The client really wanted to see pictures of the chair already, and said that structurally there ought to be some sort of working chair framework by now. Bloody idiot clients. Don’t they realise that making a chair is much more complicated than that? A fully working chair only comes together at the end of the project. I decided to send them some close-up photos of one of the legs to appease them - the wooden one. They really liked the little engravings and said that that was just the sort of thing they were after! God, I’m brilliant!

Two days before the end of the project, I had the carpenters knock together a few planks of wood to make a “back-rest”. These sorts of things aren’t very important so I didn’t want to waste much time on it. We bought a cheap off-the-peg cushion to attach to it. It was bright pink and a bit too large, but if we squashed it and nailed it to the back-rest with some nails I found in the storage room it kind of fitted, although some of the nails did end up poking out a bit. Anyway, who cares about that? It’s going to end up being covered by the upholstery, so no-one’s going to see it.

Last day before submission and the upholstery finally arrived. Absolutely lovely floral patterns on gorgeous material! I regretted (almost) everything I had said to the bosses about them. They clearly know what they’re doing. And so much work had gone into it too! There was about 40ft of material all hand-stitched together. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit the chair but luckily I’m quite talented at fixing that sort of thing, so I cut out a central section and glued it to the backrest. The upholstery team were rather angry about that, but they’re just pretentious perfectionists - I have a much more practical eye. They were muttering something about waste and lack of direction and I tended to agree - they must sort themselves out if they want a future in upholstery.

When the clients arrived the next day, they were furious. They demanded to know how the hell they were supposed to be able to sit on a chair with four unevenly sized legs, no seat, and a backrest that pierced your skin. I was most enraged! I went to see the bosses to complain about the clients - what did they know? They never said anything about having to be able to sit in the chair! Moving the bloody goalposts all the time, those shits, blaming me instead of themselves! Besides, if there had have been time, we could have sorted out those sorts of quirks, but the clients had to have it in a month, didn’t they? As if it’s possible to make a decent chair in that time!

Arseholes.

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