By Pat Cashman

While out for a jog recently---a jog that turned into a sprint when a German Shepherd came after me---I noticed a “For Lease” sign sitting in the empty window of a failed restaurant. After Cujo got distracted and ran after a bicyclist, I strolled back to the restaurant and peered in the window.

I knew that restaurant. I’d almost had a meal there once. But it was not to be. And I think I now know why the place didn’t survive.
The reason is startling.

You see, in this still struggling economy---with its still intermittent shortages of gas, water and expensive large-bore drilling machines that work---there is yet another shortage that has gone unreported.
Until now.

What follows is my exclusive and stunning conclusion:
A few years ago, my wife and I made reservations at the restaurant mentioned above. It was a fondue place we had never been to before---or ever again as it turned out.

We made reservations for four. But an hour before we arrived, a fifth person decided to join us. We figured it wouldn’t be a problem, so we all hopped into a car together and headed out.

But as we walked up to the entrance, I noticed a sign in the window that read: “Help Wanted.” It seemed like a plea of unspoken desperation---and a foretelling.

Experts say that whenever you see a sign with that message in a restaurant window---or a funeral home---you should run back to your car as fast as possible and drive away.
We didn’t.

Upon entering a friendly hostess met us immediately. “We’re the Cashman party,” I told her. “We have reservations for four, but there are actually FIVE of us.”

The hostess looked stricken. “Five?” she gasped. “But we don’t have enough chairs for five!”
I looked around the restaurant, which was half-full at best.

“What about all THOSE empty chairs?” I said, pointing to dozens of them. “Couldn’t we just grab one of those?”
“That wouldn’t work, “ she said. “We have just enough chairs for each table---and we have other customers coming.”

I tried again. “But isn’t there just ONE more chair, someplace? Y’know like maybe in the kitchen---or outside the back door where your employees go to smoke?”
The hostess was resolute. “We have NO other chairs.”

“How about a stool?” I begged. “Maybe a waste basket or a tackle box?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.

Our party of five shuffled out the door of the fondue joint---bewildered and cheeseless.
And then I was struck by the obvious truth: We are in the midst of a global chair shortage---and that now-extinct restaurant was the canary in the mine.

The alarming evidence is all around us. Open your eyes.

Big companies are discovering that no matter how many people they lay off, they are still always two or three chairs short for their staff meetings.

A colleague reports that he was recently released from a high-tech firm he had worked at for ten years. “They told me it wasn’t poor job performance or decreased revenues,” he said. “They said they simply could not find a place for me to sit.”

Remember how network TV news anchors like Walter Cronkite used to deliver the news sitting down? But these days, you see newer network news people being forced to do their newscasts standing up---as if they were mere field reporters.

Perhaps, with TV revenues not as high as they used to be, chairs have become an unjustifiable luxury.
Before long, football games, live theatre and even movie Cineplex’s will all be “standing room only.” It’s already happening at Sea-Tac, with lots of tall tables in the concourse for quick meals, but NO chairs.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we may soon become a completely chair-less society---forced to be upright for haircuts, teeth cleanings, roller coaster rides and minor surgeries.

Airplane travelers will no longer be complaining about legroom, but headroom.
The “bottom” line is that I hope my fellow citizens will soon realize that we have an inchoate chair shortage in this country---and until we find out what inchoate means, it will only get worse.

So take warning: Chairs are endangered. Let’s not kid ourselves. We must protect and defend the chairs that we DO have.

We must fight against those who would like to impose chair control in this country. Otherwise, only criminals will have chairs---electric or otherwise.

There will be people who deny the chair crisis is real. They’re perfectly content to “stand around” and do nothing.

But if we get complacent, someday our children---and our children’s children---will grow up in a world where chairs will only be objects they see in pictures of a history book.

And a youngster’s grandpa will take them to visit MOHAI---where the child will point to a red-colored inflated rubber pillow and ask, “What is that, Grandpa?”

“People used to put them on things called chairs,” the old man will say. “But when chairs went away, they became obsolete.”

And then a tear will form on the elderly gentleman’s face, as he speaks in a faltering voice: “They called them…whoopee cushions.”

pat@patcashman.com
Pat can also be seen on TV’s “the [206]”---and heard on a weekly on-line show: Peculiarpodcast.com