Perhaps the most common of all campus seats, the Hamilton desk-chair is here reviewed for posterity. Chair reviews—like CULPA for things on which it is appropriate to sit.

The face of evil

You walk into Lit Hum just as it starts—as always—and quickly scan the room to find the open seat. There’s one in the corner, so you sneak over quickly and quietly sit down.

Or so you’d like to think.

But this is Hamilton Hall—the chairs are not chairs, but utilitarian chair-desks. Because this seat is in the corner, it is at such an angle that the desk blocks you from slipping gracefully into the seat. You try to reposition the chair, but end up slamming it into every adjacent desk, backpack, and classmate. The people next to your target seat begrudgingly nudge over their own chair-desks, giving you a measly five inches of clearance to slide into the chair.

Finally seated, you pull out your copy of the Aeneid and put it on the diminutive desktop.  Then you lean down into your backpack to grab your notebook and a pen when—plop—your book falls off the desk, hits your shin, and bounces into the middle of the room. It’s time to do that desk dance again.

With all materials securely arranged on your desk, you begin to take notes. The desktop isn’t big enough to write in your notebook alongside an open book, but as you’re “chill” and “easygoing,” so you decide to hold the book open with one hand on your lap and write with your other—hoping the notebook doesn’t take a nosedive down the glossy desk surface. It does.

After half an hour, the professor tells everyone to pull out their laptops for a quick exercise. You need both your notebook notes and the book to complete the assignment. Shit. Somehow you manage to get your laptop out and, with no room left on the desk, have the notebook and book piled in your lap.

Now, you need to use your notebook notes but can’t because the book is covering them. You try putting the book on the elbow section of the desk, but that’s not working as you still have to keep it open to a certain page and it keeps slipping off the side.

With no room left on your desk or your lap, you resignedly place your book atop your head, opened like a triangular hat.

This malicious inbred chair-desk has succeeded in turning you into a dunce. At least you’re already in the corner.

Hamilton chair-desk: 2/10 for utility; 5/10 for poetic justice