Korean Job Discussion Forums

[VanIslander]

Am I the only one to have broken a chair in Korea?!

Never broke a non-lawn chair in my life yet have demolished two in Korea. Both were computer chairs I like to lean back on a lot. Took months of use and i could tell it wasn't very sturdy, but still...

Anyone else experienced a furniture malfunction?

[b_canadian_eh]

Two computer chairs to date.

[discostar23]

was teaching a music class with about eight 4 year olds. Went to go sit down on a folding chair with my guitar in hand. The chair broke and I ended up on my butt. The kids still talk about it to date (it was a year ago)

[oneofthesarahs]

I busted a computer chair at work, but that could have something to do with my penchant for constantly adjusting the height of my chair. Eventually it wouldn't go up anymore....only down. My coworker has broken a total of three computer chairs. Eventually they gave her a nicer chair. I keep joking that I should break more chairs so I can get a nice new one too.

[Big_Crazy_Ape]

i only busted 1 chair at work. one of the 6 legs broke off when i was leaning too far over, and being a big guy, i guess it was too much to hand for it
oh well...

[captain kirk]

Computer chairs. The support at the bottom is brittle plastic, too easily surprised by my descending, jumbo ass pear. At a respectable 107 kilos I've broken two. I guess my butt is like Bruce Lee, fast and dangerous when I lunge to take a load off and WHAM. I end up riding it down, backwards, to the floor HARD, like an astronaut thrown back at liftoff, tremendous G forces.

I lay on the floor after the loud WHAM in my skull(the back of my head whiplashed the floor, the floor was unhurt), looking up and around from a prone position, in the sudden, deafening silence, looking up at my co-workers, sitting quite normally in chairs, as I once was. Ah, the average, everyday office world busy at their tendonitis of the brain.

No look of concern, just annoyance. I thought, 'why, you farked up unsympathetic farking co-workers!'. I found out later they were jealous, because that chair rodeo ride down HARD was an enviable diversion, it secretly appeared to them (though they'd never admit it). They just wouldn't dare crack their princessy skulls for the sake of adventure, and so remained out of the rodeo, like pallid wallflowers slurping their tepid green tea, barely able to control their perverse compulsion to pierce their nostrils with paperclips, like savages!

[kotakji]

Two computer chairs for me as well, my cats tend to add extra wear and tare though.

[JongnoGuru]

Not sure if I busted it or if I just wounded it. Definitely gave it a decided list to one side somehow. It was one of those tall-backed, cushy, leathery, handsome, "you da man!" executive chairs. You know the type, every Korean boss in every Korean office has one. It swivels, tilts, goes up, goes down, and rolls around on casters. But the most important features are that it looks gaudy & pretentious, and the seat back is tall enough so when he turns and faces the window, nobody can see Most Honourable General Manager sleeping off a jag for half the afternoon.

Anyway, after nearly a year it developed this annoying list I mention. You didn't have to sit in it, you could see from just looking at the chair that it was tilting to one side, and also sloping forward very slightly. When seated, I found myself constantly trying to correct it by leaning hard in the other direction. And psychosomatic or not, I began to get deep lower-back pain that progressed from mild to almost debilitating, which I happily blamed on that damned titling chair.

When months of trying to lean it back into proper position didn't work, I tipped the chair onto its side and attempted to straighten its spine by brute force -- standing with all my weight on the column and pulling upwards like mad *beep* on the seat-back. Not such a great idea, for in addition to the pre-existing list, which was still there, the chair seat now had a serious wobble as well. Gave it away.

Currently, I'm in the midst of a long-running telephone & email affair with the girl at DuoBack Korea's A/S centre. I bought DuoBack chairs for the office and home nearly two years ago, and within a year the soft, thick plastic covering on the polyurethane armpads began to split open. God knows how these spilts, these cracks ever start, but the nature of them is that once they do, there's no stopping them, they just continue on until they reach the next seam. I didn't do anything when it was just one armpad on my chair, but then the same thing started happening to other people's chairs, even a chair almost nobody ever uses, and then one at my house, and suddenly it's "Houston, we have a problem".

This being Korea, you never know if you're in for the sweetest, most attentive and generous A/S experience of your life... or an infernal, blame-shirking runaround when you call an A/S centre. In our case, it was the former! In fact, after giving the girl our model numbers but before explaining the problem, she was already describing the problem we were having and asking for a mailing address to send new armpads. By the very next afternoon, we had two boxes of new DuoBack armpads -- they come in pairs, so we had more than we needed. I contacted her again months later about something else, and unrequested she sent over more boxes of armpads.