New Office News

Not long ago, I got a new office. Well, it's not really new, but it's new to me. Dr. Dresback vacated it to move to an office with a window and a thermostat (I wouldn't mind having those). I thought I was going to be in my office much earlier in the year, but the string of dominoes took longer than expected. Anyway, there are two large tables and a drafting table in the office. Additionally, a fairly run of the mill drafting stool was left in there.

The first thing I did was put the tables on bed risers, because I can't get my legs under the tables at their normal height (because of the way the tables are braced). That wasn't a big deal. But, raising the tables made it so I couldn't work comfortably at them with a normal chair. Uh oh. So, my plan was to get a nice drafting stool.

Oops. I soon found out that finding a nice drafting stool is much more difficult than I ever imagined. There is a furniture store just north of campus that has a contract with the university and has high-quality chairs. Unfortunately, the features that make chairs comfortable for me do not exist on drafting stools, namely seat sliders and tilting features. I can see how tilting might cause a change in the sum of the moments with respect to the base of the chair, potentially resulting in the drafting stool tumbling over backwards. But, I don't know why you can't get a seat slider on a drafting stool. To the best of my knowledge, seat sliders move the seat forward while keeping the position of the back rest constant with respect to the base of the chair. I presume most people who might tip something over backwards sit as far back in the chair as possible, especially ones who would want a seat slider to increase the seat depth. So, the position of the person's body, relative to the base of the chair and the "tipping point", should not be affected by the seat slider.

But, anyway, the lady (another Casey) who was helping me tried to find me a drafting stool that would work. Nope. So, I moved to plan B. To sit at the tables on 5 1/4 inch risers, I needed the seat height to be about 25 inches. Nice chairs often have pneumatic adjusters to raise the seat up to about 22 inches. So, I just need to lower the tables 3 inches to use a regular chair ... seat slider, here I come. So, I ordered some stackable one inch riser last night and also found a chair I really like that should fit perfectly. I only needed a little extra height on the tables to have clearance for my legs, so 2 inches should more than do the trick. It should be about a week before I have either the new risers or the chair, but I'm pretty excited to have a new, comfortable chair!