A couple of weeks ago my office chair broke. Something in the tilt mechanism snapped and it turned into a bobblehead doll.
Office chairs aren't cheap and it was an unexpected expenditure, so for several days I tried to make the best of it. It required the balance of a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. Shift your weight a little too far forwards and you were doing a header into the keyboard. A little to the back and you'd be doing a somersault. Before long my back was going into spasm, so we bit the bullet and bought a new chair.
The old one was shunted off to a corner, but yesterday we were catching up on our housekeeping before taking our first plunge in the vat out back. The boyfriend had had enough of the chair and wheeled it into the garage.
Just what we needed - more broken down crap taking up space in the garage. But what to do? It was too large to fit in the trash bin and they won't pick up random crap thats just wheeled to the curb. I thought about loading it in the car and finding a dumpster somewhere, but that seemed to be entirely too much work.
And then it dawned on me. I need to think like a local.
So I grabbed a marker and a sheet of paper and wrote "FREE" on it. I taped it to the chair and wheeled it out on the lawn.
"No one is going to take that!" the boyfriend protested. And he had a point. It was obviously broken. It looked like it had had it's neck snapped and was hanging off kilter.
"Let's just give it a chance" I said. "It's Bakersfield."
Ten minutes later I peeked through the front blinds.
The chair was gone.
I swear these people are like locusts.
