I've had the same chair now for way over a year. Its a wonderful chair, the padding is all compressed to shape my, um.. body. The swivel even seems to know which way my computer is.

Over its life time the back rest has came off a few times, normaly just the screws come slack and then fall out. That was until a few days ago when they came out again, this time pulling out all of the screw thred making the screw holes totaly usless.

So, i removed the screws totaly and just made do with a plastic tubing thing that cover the metal bar that the head rest attaches to, to keep on the head rest.. and it works fine. But it was time to get a new chair.

So, my dad and I headed to the local town centre. We parked in a car park for a shop called Aldi. I'm not sure of an Amerian alternative but its one of them stores where you can get food for cheap, and various other stuff.

So, we Stationary Box as i knew it sold chairs. Sadly they all sucked... well, they wern't what i was looking for anyways.

I don't like arms on computer/office chairs because of the keyboard drawer.. you normaly can't get the drawer all the way out because of it hitting the arms. I also wanted a chair with a large back rest... kinda like my old one.

So, the only other shop i knew of in the town centre was Argos (one of them a catalouge shops), so we headed there.

After looking in the catalouge i saw on i liked, but it was ?45.. thats way more than i wanted to pay on one chair, but i needed a new chair so i checked if they had it in stock on this little computer thing, only to see the message: "Sorry, this item is not currently in stock. Please select another item". So, we headed back to the car, chairless.

On the way back, my dad said to me. "Lets have a look in Aldi", the shop we parked at, "they might sell them". I replied "nah, they won't have any. but it can't hurt to look".

Entering the store i had a quick look down the "various other stuff" isle, and saw no chair like looking items but had a look at things anyway as there is might be something else that i wanted (hooray for impulse buying).

After a little looking and seing nothing, we started to head back out, then i suddenly saw 3 self assembly chairs that looked VERY firmillar. On closer inspection it was (almost) EXACTLY the same as my broken chair, and i promply bought not one, but two chairs (one for my dad, i hate his chair) for a nice price of ?20 each, which is way better than ?45 for one.

So, we got them back home and assembled them both.

This is where the fun started, because i was so used to my other chair, i couldn't get comfortable on my new one. I put it down to the padding and thought i'd give it a few weeks.

Well, that week turned in to around 10 hours (excluding sleep). So, this morning (about 30 minutes before writing this entry). I took the back off my new chair and fixed it on to the base of my old chair. Ah.. good old chair.

I then found out that last night my dad had done the same as me, prefering the smaller back from his old chair.

Basicly i guess we spent ?40 on 2 new chairs, only to use them for spare parts.

Wow.. who knew one could write so much about buying a new chair.