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Although we do have space set aside at the Condé Nast building in New York, it's rare that we actually are in a position to use it. Instead, each of us works out of our respective homes scattered across the USA. We did a short gallery last year showing what our home offices look like (spoiler alert: lots of Macs), but we didn't focus much on that all-important bit of office kit: the chair. People like us who spend most of the day writing have an extremely close relationship with their office chairs. We spend eight, 10, or 12 hours every day (and sometimes even more!) sprawled in the things, and a good chair can make the difference between a productive workspace and crippling boneitis. You'd think that we'd all have high-quality crazy space chairs—and some of us actually do—but like any other group, we're actually pretty diverse in our seating choices. In fact, a couple of us don't use chairs at all. Senior IT reporter Jon Brodkin starts us out with his thoroughly average and only half-functional Office Max special: "This chair is pretty comfortable, but there’s nothing special about it.
I bought it years before I started working at home, at Office Max or Office Depot, and I think I paid somewhere between $50 and $75 for it. The only problem is that it doesn’t always stay up at its full height, so I have to hit the lever a few times a week to raise it back up again. I don’t know why Lee wants a picture of it, but he’s a bit off in the head and he lives in Texas so I usually avoid asking too many questions." IT editor Sean Gallagher sent along this photograph of a freakishly green Ikea Markus chair, offering only this short explanation: "I put it against a wall to shoot it, and one of my cats jumped into it." The Markus is a nice looking chair, but in that color it looks like it was ripped right out of the control room overlooking Santa's factory. Microsoft editor Peter Bright sits in a seat similar to Sean's, though Peter's chair lacks Sean's garish green hue. Says Peter: "The chair I use is the Ikea Markus. It's only a few weeks old. I needed a new office chair after emigrating, and while I'm intrigued by The Wirecutter's $800 Steelcase Leap recommendation I'm not going to spend that much money on a chair without giving my ass an opportunity to sample it—something that Ikea makes easy.
Plus, it was an opportunity to stock up on meatballs. "A few weeks in and the chair seems to be holding up fine. It's perhaps not the most attractive thing I've ever seen, but it seems decently comfortable even for long sessions, and I think I'm probably slouching a bit less than normal." Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham's chair looks positively beefy—which is weird, because Andrew himself has the dimensions of a Festivus pole. Still, it holds a special place in his rail-thin heart. He explains: "My chair is not exotic, nor is the story of how I bought it: we went to our local Staples, sat in a bunch of office chairs, and picked the most comfortable one in our price range (as I recall, it was a $250 chair on sale for $150). It’s a gripping tale of budgets and sensible decision-making! "The reason why I was buying the chair looms larger in my mind than the chair itself. It was the spring of 2011, and after several years of writing for little to nothing (heavy emphasis on the “nothing”) I was finally making enough to justify some additional investment.
Item one on the list was an actual desk chair to replace the '80s-looking thing my parents had given me to go with my first post-college apartment. It’s not the best chair, but it was one of the first things I bought in service of the career I really wanted." Ars Editor-at-Large Jacqui Cheng steps things up a considerable number of notches, leaving behind Office Depot Specials and stepping into the world of dedicated task seating. Says Jacqui: "My chair is a Humanscale Freedom chair with a headrest and swiveling arms. After 7.5 years of working from home in a terrible $50 Staples chair, my back (and butt) couldn’t take it anymore. As someone with chronic lower back problems, I could no longer deal with sitting in a cheap chair that wasn’t really made for me, so I bit the bullet and spent weeks testing nicer chairs to find out which one I liked. "The Humanscale Freedom was the one I settled on (although I also liked the Herman Miller Mirra) because of the way it positions my spine when I sit.
I’m able to sit comfortably without pain in my power back, plus the whole chair conforms to your spine when you lean back, so different parts of the chair move in different ways. The swivel arms are meant to turn inward so they better support you while you’re typing, although I think they could swivel inward a little more. Overall, this is indeed an expensive chair, but I’ve found it to be totally worthwhile after all those years in pain. I can’t believe I waited this long to prioritize having a workday without physical pain. I heart you, Freedom chair." I'm in the same boat—and chair, ha ha!—as Jacqui since I also rock a Humanscale Freedom with headrest and swivel arms. I came to it in a different fashion, though. I have always been a fan of expensive chairs. My parents bought me a Neutral Posture E-series chair as my high school graduation present, and I sat in that thing from 1996 to 2008, dragging it through three major moves. It outlasted a half-dozen desks and computers before I finally donated it to that big office surplus store in the sky.