It was another Monday morning, and outside, like clockwork, I saw Jerry walking down the sidewalk in front of my house pushing his office chair. And I’ve gotta say, it’s a great chair: a WorkPro® Quantum 9000 Series Ergonomic Mesh Mid-Back. The one he had before — a Realspace® MFTC Multifunction — wasn’t exactly shabby, but it couldn’t hold a candle to the Quantum 9000. This is the desk chair of desk chairs. Plus it’s lightweight, which means his daily wheeling back-and-forth to his desk is a piece of cake. You see, he keeps his desk at the street corner. He claims the light is better there, and I have to admit, he’s got a point.

Okay, okay, so Jerry’s a bit different, so what? He’s a good guy. And a hard worker. He puts in his 9:00 to 5:00, with usually only a 30 minute break, spent twirling on his chair in the shade of a nearby tree. Lots of fresh air. Lots of fresh air. And the exercise! Just pushing that chair back and forth — to his desk in the morning and back home again in the late afternoon — I can’t even begin to imagine how many calories he burns just by doing that. Smart fellow, Jerry. To tell you the truth, the rest of us in the neighborhood envy him. The guy has got it made. Oh, the others probably won’t admit it. They’ll hem and they’ll hah and they’ll make roundabout excuses — some might even venture a mild objection regarding the extension cables — but if you listen between the lines, you’ll hear what’s really there: They envy him. I envy him. We all do.

It’s because he saw an opportunity and he took it. He saw that space there on the corner, the one at the stop sign, where you can turn either left or right. It wasn’t taken. It was empty. Empty! And Jerry saw that empty space and said “This would be just perfect for my desk!” And I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right. It was perfect. That was some three years ago now, I think. He’s had his desk out there that long. Goodness, how time flies! And so he’s become a regular sight, Jerry has, both morning and evenings, first pushing his Realspace® MFTC Multifunction, and then more recently the WorkPro® Quantum 9000 (which is a really fine chair, let me just say) past my window on the way to and from his work, Monday through Friday and sometimes even on the weekends.

The rest of us were just too slow to recognize a good thing. Now, every morning and every evening, I load my office chair onto the top of my car (it would be a helluva lot easier if I had a pickup) and drive off to work. And when I get to the corner, where Jerry’s already hard at it, and maybe even working on a second cup of coffee, I wave, and I think to myself, Damn, I wish I’d have thought fast on my feet like Jerry.