The Uncomfortable Seat

In “Anecdotal Tales”, stories will be told. Some will be fun, some will not. Some will be great, some will be less so. Some stories are true, some are merely possible. This is one of them.

The Uncomfortable Seat

H32 was not having the greatest of days.  There hardly was a good day to be had when one was a theater seat, but today seemed especially vexing for H32.  This was the day that a four year-old had taken to jumping up and down on it while letting their chocolate bar smear over every available surface.  The smearing of sugar and milk products made H32 sneer.  People do not appreciate the amount of patience it takes to live a life of being sat on.  H32’s job wasn’t the most difficult, but it grew weary of the pressure that was laid on it hour after hour, day after day.

Tuesdays were the worst days.  Discount night at the theater brought out the cheapskates; those that felt they could put their legs up on the chair in front of them and treat seats as their own personal trash can.  H32 might have understood if they stopped at leaving their garbage in its cup holders, but it never stopped there.  If there was going to be gum stuck to the bottom of its seat, odds are it occurred on a Tuesday.  As a way of making things worse, patrons seemed to use their extra money to buy nachos.  Nachos with extra cheese.  The biological effects of the nachos ruined H32 for the rest of the night.  It fought to keep the stench from overwhelming its senses.  In the rare instances where the eater of complex foods did allow H32 to escape the silent killer, there was always the strong possibility that the cheese would end up smeared on what was once perfectly nice fabric.

H32 knew that other seats had it much worse.  There were seats in new theaters that were made to jostle and thrash themselves side to side so that their occupant could feel “entertained”.  The patron didn’t care how much the programmed movement nauseated and disoriented the seat.  Some chairs were kicked and kicked and kicked until they finally snapped in half; a jagged crack in the plastic scarred their spinal region.  H32 was in a somewhat comfortable theater.  The reckless crowd didn’t sit in his area.  They always seemed to prefer the back rows.  At least, that’s what Q thru X claimed every night after closing.  Any chair that resided in that area was guaranteed to smell of either cigarettes or alcohol several nights a week.  H32 didn’t take kindly to the toddlers that would stand on his seat while drooling on his back.  However it was a far better fate than being puked on or having a cigarette extinguished on its seat and feeling the dim ambers burn through its fibers and padding.

H32 had tried to get early retirement.  Of all the seats in the theater, H32 squeaked the loudest.  If the staff had cared as much as the rest of the chairs did, H32 would have been WD40ed long ago.  That was not the case.  The slackers, the partiers, and the under-age kids that got paid to loosely wear their polo shirts just wanted a paycheck and a free movie for them and their friends to watch.  The actual work held no interest for them.  They tore a sampling of tickets, let the popcorn gather like pennies in a piggy bank, and hurried their way through a quick clean at the end of the night so they could go on to something much more enjoyable.  These were not the people that made repairs; these were the people that smoked a few with their friends in row W.

H32 started to feel that it was time to take its game up a notch.  The only way it could escape would be to make its presence so intolerable that management would step in.  H32 was an aisle seat, how hard could it be to get kicked out?  It just wanted to be broken down and freed of this thankless task.  The spilled sodas, the keys and pointy belts poking at its once pristine fabric; the abuse was awful.

Then there was the kicking.  The endless kicking from antsy adults, obnoxious children, and elderly men with canes who wanted the folks in front of him to pipe down.  If one more person in row J took out their frustration on H32’s backside, it was outta here.  The pain would be severe, the infliction upon itself would be desperate, but H32 was ready for that drastic gambit.  If it came down to it, H32 would spring a few coils and poke anyone who tried to use him right in their rear.  Normally cushions were expected to soften a blow, but H32 was set to break that trend.

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