So Bar­bara and I have been wrestling with fur­ni­ture sales­peo­ple these last cou­ple of weeks, try­ing to get the thing we envi­sion for our offices at Vague Inno­va­tion. We frit­tered away a bit over a week with some­body from Michi­gan Office Inte­ri­ors (no link deserved, because they really don’t rate very high on know­ing triv­ial details like, oh, what they actu­ally can and can­not build).

It’s not com­pli­cated. But it’s not fuzzy cubi­cle crap, and it’s not melamine, and it’s not that clichéd Eames-​​era ripoff stuff, and Her­man Miller doesn’t sell it. So it’s nearly impos­si­ble to find, and damned dif­fi­cult to arrange from off-​​the-​​shelf parts.

We’re even flex­i­ble about design vocab­u­lary: it needs to match some other chairs we’ve ordered — where “match” is an aes­thetic and design pat­tern oper­a­tor, not a color thingie. It needs to look like it’s from the 1940s. But from an indus­trial cen­ter, a work­ing engi­neer­ing or lab firm, so it’ll either be graphite steel, or aged oak. Not alu­minum, not ply­wood, not steel­case square-​​cornered Bauhaus crap, sure as hell not Ikea, not Indus­trial Mid­den, not particle-​​board Saud­er­ware, not tubes, not plex­i­glass, not lat­eral files, not mesh, not green-​​and-​​orange, not Amish, not Crafts­man, not Exec­u­tive leatherette-​​and-​​mahogany.

If it’s steel, it will be gray sparkly office fur­ni­ture col­ored, rounded, and heavy. Two 40-​​inch book­cases, fac­ing out, sup­port­ing a fit­ted eight-​​foot long gray coun­ter­top with rounded edges, the same width as the cases. That’s it! If one wants to get fancy, then one of those book­cases could be a lock­ing two-​​door stor­age cab­i­net, like from a lab.

If it’s oak, then it should look like pared-​​down effi­cient cheap but sturdy lab fur­ni­ture. Like library tables, or the things you may recall from very old schools. Planked oak, with an apron. Same dimen­sions, same sup­ports, although here they’d want to be oak book­cases, sim­ple, square-​​cornered, succinct.

Every lit­tle nub­bin of oak these days is the Wrong Color. Every lit­tle scrap of metal these days is the Wrong Color, or the Wrong Shape, or per­haps the Wrong Size.

And so we set out to work (Cf. above) with a “cus­tom” office fur­ni­ture place that could “do any­thing we wanted”… and we encoun­tered seven (7) dis­tinct cases of “Woops! We can’t get it in that shape/​color/​texture/​finish.…” The Formica we picked was dis­con­tin­ued; the book­cases came in only other fin­ishes; the two end sup­ports were one inch dif­fer­ent in height; you can’t stick alu­minum bases on those stools; you can’t have that fab­ric on the back… &c &c &c.

And every­thing, from every­where in the fuck­ing world, is exactly “three weeks” from being done.

And as it hap­pens, that’s the thing that I hate most. I can shop. I’m good at shop­ping. I am a patient man, as many folks will tell you. But when every­thing is at least three weeks away, no mat­ter what — includ­ing a piece of fur­ni­ture (a chair I haven’t men­tioned) from an actual fur­ni­ture store, bought straight off the cat­a­log page — is three weeks from being “ready”, that makes me think one thing: lean.

When everybody’s lean, and has no inven­tory, then every­body has to wait that min­i­mum three weeks’ lead time for absolutely every thing in the world. Unless it’s weird stuff, of course; that takes extra.

Everybody’s lean, with­out being at all agile. They’re anorexic.

And that’s frustrating.

Scan­ning a copy of The Lost Art of Read­ing, by Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee. Google has already scanned one, but mine will be better.

When one con­sid­ers that it is a lit­eral, sci­en­tific, demon­stra­ble fact that there is not a sin­gle evil that can be named in mod­ern life, social, reli­gious, polit­i­cal, or indus­trial, which is not based on the nar­row­ness and blind­ness of classes of men toward one another, it is very hard to sit by and watch the mod­ern col­lege almost every­where, with its silent, deadly Thing-​​emphasis upon it, edu­cat­ing every man it can reach, into not know­ing other men, into not know­ing even himself.

and (test­ing Google Books and its txt-​​selection tool a bit):

The test of civil­i­sa­tion is what it produces—its man, if only because he pro­duces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the spe­cial­ist to set the pace for us, either to be spe­cial­ists our­selves or vul­garly to com­pete with spe­cial­ists for the right of liv­ing, or get­ting a liv­ing, there is going to be a crash some­time. Then a sense of empti­ness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The specialist’s view of the world log­i­cally nar­rows itself down to a race of nonen­ti­ties for noth­ings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a noth­ing to a nonen­tity. And if it is the one busi­ness of the spe­cial­ist to obtain results, and we are all brow­beaten into being spe­cial­ists, but one result is going to be pos­si­ble. It is obvi­ous that the man who is will­ing to sac­ri­fice the most is going to have the most suc­cess in the race, crowd out and humil­i­ate or anni­hi­late the oth­ers. If this is to be the world, it is only men who are ready to die for noth­ing in order to cre­ate noth­ing who will be able to secure enough of noth­ing to rule it.…

Empha­sis not needed. But you can tell what sen­tence I would have bolded, maybe.