My work-on-computer-stuff-at-home vacation has inspired a search for a proper office chair to replace the green Fred Meyer folding chair I've been sitting on for six years. I knew Aeron bliss at a previous employer, but prices have not come down since the boom. I had high hopes for the Mirra, but it turns out that (right now at least) they're not that much cheaper. There's always eBay, though I'm wary because I've sat in a broken Aeron or two at the aforementioned previous employer. They're probably just fine used, but I don't like to be disappointed.

So I did some sloppy research and went walking around downtown Seattle looking for a quality chair, especially to see if I could find a Mirra to sit in and convince me of its worth. The official Herman Miller seating dealers in town wouldn't talk to me; they don't want to sell one chair to one guy, they want to rent a hundred chairs to a company. Furniture Row in downtown Seattle has almost no home office furniture, and InForm gets extra frowny faces for being especially rude when I said that their $2500 office chair was out of my price range. I tired quickly of the experience, but knew of an office furniture store near Seattle Center from its big ugly readerboard, and thought I'd give them a try.

Seattle Office Furniture earns a plug for being especially helpful after a long day of walking and being scoffed at. No Herman Miller, but they introduced me to HumanScale's Freedom Chair, a luxury chair priced like an Aeron, which I quite enjoyed. They had plenty of more realistic options, and were able to convince me that I could get a high quality office chair for as little as $250, such as the Performa 2 Plus from izzydesign (stupid Flash site doesn't have info on the Performa, but it's theirs, formerly Superior Seating). Real office chairs have thick comfy seating foam, easy but basic adjustables, and come in a wide variety of colors and optional features. Expensive steel or titanium seat pans and frames may not be necessary for comfortable keyboarding.

The third result on a Google search for "Aeron chair": dack.com : the aeron chair sucks. (Probably old by now, but still funny.)