When we first heard about "new technology" at The Irish Times, years ago, I thought it was only computerisation they had in mind. The full extent of the changes didn't really hit me until last week, when I was invited to a seminar on how to operate the office chair, writes Frank McNally
"Seminar" is a slight overstatement, I suppose. It was just a 15-minute demonstration of the new chairs, really, incorporating a question-and-answer session. But even so, it struck me that things had come to a pass when the act of sitting at your desk required upskilling.
Then again, the Aeron Office Chair is no ordinary piece of furniture. It has more moving parts than many of the people using it; being adjustable for lumbar depth, lumbar height, tilt tension, seat-pan angle, seat height, arm-rest angle and arm-rest height.
Instead of upholstery, it has a "pellicle": a breathable, form-fitting mesh material that, according to the manufacturers, takes its name from the protective membrane of "protozoa", allowing users "to retain shape, distribute pressure evenly [ and] stay cool and comfortable, no matter what the temperature".
I'm not particularly comfortable with the protozoa-worker analogy, but we'll let that pass. The main thing is that the chair is a masterpiece of ergonomic design. Introducing the Aeron in 1994, its creator boasted that the lack of straight lines made it a "metaphor of human form in the visual as well as the tactile sense". Most critics agreed. It has since won more awards than any office chair in history.
The problem is that, after sitting on it for three months now, many of us still don't know how it works. Of course we could find out by reading the manual, which may well be an acceptable option for female users. But if being a man means anything, it means you never, ever consult a manual, relying instead on your innate aptitude for understanding things mechanical.
The result, in the case of the Aeron, is that many of us are using about 15 per cent of its operating capacity.
An added complication of the chair's flexibility is the phenomenon known as "hot desking". If you were the only user, it could be set to your specifications and left there. But in a busy multi-shift office, you can come in in the morning and log on to your chair, only to find that all the settings have all been changed overnight by the six-foot-four freelance who shares it. Hence the need for staff demos.
I note that, in 12 years of mostly glowing reviews, the Aeron has attracted the odd quibble here and there. The proliferation of knobs and levers has always been frowned upon. But one review even questioned its flexibility, suggesting that "if you like to tuck your ankle under your thigh" while sitting, the chair is not that comfortable. No doubt the next generation of technology will address this glaring defect.
The Aeron 2.0 will probably be a "smart" chair, greeting you by name in the morning and asking how the kids are while it automatically readjusts to your configuration. For the moment, its manually operated predecessor remains state-of-the-art (with a place in the design gallery of New York's Museum of Modern Art to prove it).
No doubt we'll finally have the hang of it by the time the replacement arrives.
The humble chair has, of course, inspired many artists, both as a design object and as a motif in painting. Vincent Van Gogh's chair continues to inspire us with its simple beauty, despite the fact - I say this in the light of what I now know - that it is an ergonomic disaster. Witness its distended foreleg, its lack of lumbar depth, and the oft-remarked tension (completely non-adjustable) between its line and colour.
Van Gogh painted the picture at a time of crisis, interrupting the work to cut his ear off in response to the break-up of his intense artistic and personal relationship with fellow artist Paul Gauguin. During the same period, interestingly, he also painted Gauguin's armchair, with a candlestick and two books sitting on it. And the stark contrast between the pictures has inspired much speculation about the extent to which they are symbolic of the painters' conflicting personalities and stormy friendship.
The critic Albert Lubin saw the Gauguin chair as a hermaphroditic symbol, with its "broad curving bottom" representing the female form, and the candle and "two modern novels" representing the male.
He continued: "Gauguin, in this bisexual role, may have represented [ Van Gogh's] loved-feared-hated mother - a dangerously phallic mother of the kind often uncovered during psychoanalysis in the submerged fantasies of male patients whose fears of women and their genitals beget strong homosexual predispositions."
A critic of Lubin responded by quoting Freud: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." And I suppose it could equally be said that sometimes a chair is just a chair (albeit not in the new Irish Times offices).
But art is a great comfort in times of change.
As we continue to wrestle with the new technology, I think what Van Gogh teaches is that, whatever we may think, our chairs are not nearly as complicated as his.