I decided it was about time to buy a comfortable office chair. I work from home and I sit on a chair all day so I thought it was about time it was comfortable to do this. I asked around for recommendations of shops that had a decent selection of quality chairs and was given the names of a couple of places, one of which was a factory outlet. I called the factory outlet to find out what time they were open and was told 8:45 until 4:00. It was 10:30 so the perfect time to go. Off we set.

We got to the outlet and found the shop. We walked into the shop and started looking around. A woman calls over to us that the shop was closed and that we had to leave. We went back outside to look at any signage that there might be. The sign said “Open” and the doors were not even closed. We went back in to ask why the shop was closed because it said open on the door. Before we even got to ask our question, the rude woman said, “didn’t you hear what I said, the shop is closed”. We asked her why the sign said open and the doors were open if the shop was closed. To which she replied, “the sales person isn’t here for another hour, come back later.” Given that we had to travel to get to the factory outlet, you would have thought they wouldn’t just turn people away, or at least have a reliable sales person!

Anyway, we went to a department store to have a look at chairs. We sat down on lots of them, pulled and pushed lots of buttons and finally decided on the chair we wanted. We didn’t like the blue colour of the one on display, but that was okay because we had a choice of four colours. We picked grey (the best colour for this particluar chair). The man got the grey chair box down and started walking us to the checkout. I pointed out that the little sticker on the side said it was blue. He said no, it’s written here as part of the bar code sticker that it’s grey. Eventually I got him to open the box to check. It was blue! Off he went in search of a grey chair. A couple of minutes later he brought one back. We paid for the chair and went home.

I started putting the chair together right away. It was quite simple once I realised that the screws to attach the seat to the back were already screwed into the seat. I put the chair together and started organising it to be comfortable for me. That was when I noticed that there was something missing. There was meant to be a lever to allow the seat of the chair to move backwards and forwards, but our chair didn’t appear to have it. What was going on? We rang the shop and said that the chair they gave us isn’t the same as the one we looked at in the shop. They said okay and to bring it back to swap it. Ruth took it back and started explaining it to the customer service person. She had to get her manager who then went to get someone from the furniture department. These people were not about to be convinced easily. Ruth explained several times that the shop model had an extra lever to allow the seat to go back and forth, that the chair we had was model 830 and the one with the level was model 840. It was clearly written on the chair that our chair was model 830. This wasn’t enough. The man from the furniture department took Ruth to the chair and started explaining all of the things that the chair did. It goes up and down, swivels, twists and the seat goes back and forth. Ah ha! That’s what our chair doesn’t do. Finally after an hour of arguing, they agreed that there were two types of chair, one with the lever and one without. They gave us the chair that we wanted (it only came in black) and I’m sitting on it now!