Man eating man-eating chair?

I was watching some YouTube videos on the weekend and saw one with an intriguing title, which I was pretty sure was a typo.

The video was supposed to be of a ‘man eating chair’ but when I started it up, it proved to be a man sitting on one of those wooden folding chairs, which suddenly started folding, catching him in the middle.

So no, it wasn’t a ‘man eating chair,’ which would have been a video about someone with strange dietary habits. It was actually about a ‘man-eating chair.’ That little hyphen makes a lot of difference.

Well, watching that video prompted YouTube to put up a whole bunch more videos like that in the list on the side of other videos I might be interested in.

Well, I wasn’t, but it did start me remembering a couple of my own incidents with chairs.

Some years ago, when I was working at a newspaper in Kamloops, we had a busy day for me, as the editorial layout person. We had a regular paper to get out as well as two reasonably large supplements.

That meant a lot of pages that had to be finished in one day, with the occasional ad size change just making life more interesting.

Well, we finished up about 8 p.m. and I pushed myself away from my desk and went to stand up.

And almost fell over.

I put my hand on the desk for support and tried to figure out why my legs felt so weak. Then I realized the last time I had stood up had been around 8 a.m. That was when I decided sitting at a desk for 12 hours was not something I wanted to do again.

After that, I made a point of getting up from my desk and taking a short walk inside the building after every few pages.

The other chair incident happened in Prince George, at the Free Press.

I stood up from my desk for a second to get something, then went to sit down again.

What I didn’t realize was someone passing my desk had accidentally moved my wheeled chair a few inches.

I sat down, and just barely caught the edge of the chair. It started to roll backwards, with me frantically trying to keep up.

I lost the race, and landed on my backside on the floor.

I couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous I must have looked, and then I saw Lori Douglass, our entertainment reporter, with her hands over her mouth.

As I started to laugh, she lowered her hands and said, “I wanted to laugh, but I was afraid you had hurt yourself.”

Nothing damaged except my pride, I assured her, and that’s something I have grown used to.

After that, though, I always made sure I knew where my chair was before I sat down.