After moving in, I noticed that something was off about my URochester dormitory cubicle. I began to hear a voice every night during Welcome Week, but I initially wrote it off as my neighbors. It persisted, though, and the voice was far too positive to be any sensible URochster student. I’d hear whispers, telling me to “keep up the good work!” and “enjoy life to the fullest!” After doing some investigative work, I found out that these overly positive phrases were from the university-provided anti-suicide chair, and these specific chair models were designed to subliminally encourage students to remain happy and healthy.
As the months wore on and I sat on it more often, something in my chair began to shift. They stopped being so nice to me. Their language went from happy, encouraging, and a little funny, to creepy incessant whispers of evil and malice. The encouragement from the beginning of the semester slowly turned into digs at my character, and eventually into death threats. I recall the first instance quite clearly: I was lying in bed, contemplating my life after a particularly horrible art midterm, and on the edge of sleep, I heard a faint whisper: “You will never have a career.” From there it only got worse. Soon my anti-suicide chair had completely shed their friendly demeanor and spent each night thinking of increasingly dehumanizing things to call me.
Somehow, I made it through to finals week. Months of berating has worn me down to almost nothing. My mental health has been on a steady decline, yet the demand for my brain to stay intact increases exponentially by the day. And to top it all off, the chair is still talking. The insults are the worst they’ve ever been: “Die, art major, die. You should end it allllllllllll” (picture the walls talking to Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets).
I’m fed up. Months of restless nights with a stupid chair whispering not-so-nice things into my ears. I’ve had it. I angrily kick the covers off of me at 2:37 in the morning. I walk over to the window of my sixth floor Susan B. Anthony dorm room, grab my illegal 13-inch machete from its carefully stored position in my illegal, too-large refrigerator, and slash open the screen. I then grab the chair of my nightmares, and push it onto the drain ledge. I climb out after the chair, hoist it over my hair, and throw it over the edge. I watch it descend: down, down, down — hey that’s my RA — SPLAT. Flattened like Plankton from Spongebob. The first emotion I feel is not regret, but rather relief. Then, I feel joy: I have finally gotten rid of the stupid chair. Then, just a little bit more joy because room inspections will surely be canceled on Friday. I think about the juicy story Campus Times will cook up, lie back down in my bed, and take my happy little self into dreamland, ready for my final on Sunday at 5 in the morning.
Wait — 5 A.M.???? What kind of psychopath schedules a test that early, and on a Sunday no less? Maybe the chair was right.
