All your chair are belong to us

I have a destructive habit. At my new job, where I've been now for about two months, I have a chair that enables me. It's one of those office-type chairs that allows you to lean back, though I like to (as the athletes say) take it to another level. I'm still within the manufacturer's boundaries of leaning, only I lean and then unlean and then lean, etc., all day long. That is to say, I rock in my chair.

It's not what I would call a nervous habit or anything, I just legitimately enjoy rocking. I always have. And no matter how much shit my new co-workers (playfully) give me about it, I won't be stopping. It's unconscious at this point. (In fact, when A. and I met on the job a few years ago she vividly remembers me rocking back and forth in my (glorious!) chair while her boss brought her around to my cube to introduce us.)

Anyway, about a month into the job I noticed the chair started squeaking a little bit, though low enough that I assumed I was the only one who could hear it. Thing is, I could feel it a little bit too, like a couple of things within the mechanism were out of whack. After a few days of this it was unmistakably making noise, enough that others around me started joking about it. And then the noise grew.

It eventually became intrusive enough that some people, unfamiliar with my "quirk," walked the floor trying to find the source of "that sound." And then Friday I get a call from the group's administrative assistant: "Can you let me know when your new chair arrives?" Um, new chair?

Yes, my chair and I must have disrupted someone so much—someone with chair-purchasing power—to say "Get that bastard a new goddamn chair!" And at this rate, if I'm here for three years, that will only need to happen about eighteen more times.