600% of people who sit in office chairs hate their lives. Getting your own swivel chair used to mean success. In the workplace, on a payroll. The halcyon, sunshine days of that first job. (See also: laminate flooring. When did that stop being a signal that you'd Made It?) But, lamentably, the swively fun turned out to be finite. That is, until you attach yourself to one and fling yourself down a big hill.
And that is precisely what happens at the Office Chair Racing World Championships in Laichingen in Germany. On May 6th, the hegemony of work drudgery is recklessly cast asunder as the most oppressed of office workers throw themselves around a racetrack to smash the shackles of the 9 to 5. This is definitely what Karl Marx had in mind. Office workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your knees.
Reaching speeds of up to 30mph, there are no first aid boxes to save you. No accident books. No risk assessments. Just cushion-soft, mould-to-your-body tarmac. The cold, hard reality of German paving all over your nice, squidgy bones.
And the lunatic adventure is big business these days. In austerity Britain, why not blow out some office brain sludge with a casual bit of mortal danger? One such company to specialise in the frankly mental is Chillisauce. Want to slide down Kilimanjaro on a pizza base? Fancy being fired into space in a sleeping bag? (Sort of.) Stag weekends, extreme sports adventures, radical team building - the brains behind Chillisauce are not so much 'glass half-full' - a bit more 'real world half-baked'.
Nonetheless, they're getting right behind the idea of skidding 200m to your doom on some plastic furniture (why wouldn't you?) and are sending intern Robert Dawson-Goody some 1000km across Europe to take part in the race. On top of that, poor Robert must get from Carnaby Street all the way to the start line armed only with social media and, in a spectacular touch, 'his own office chair'. Getting there alive means he gets a job and a hearty charitable donation. Solving unemployment one swivel chair race at a time.
(Image courtesy of Staeudle.)