Everything Wrong with New Paltz’s Dorm Chairs

How uncomfortable are you? A tongue-in-cheek review of the torturous dorm chairs at SUNY New Paltz.

Oh boy, I have been waiting a while for this. I am ready to tell it like it is. You might want to close up those ears of yours, SUNY New Paltz, because you are not going to like this skewering one bit. I’m sorry I’m not one of your “corporate elitist P.C. pawns,” New Paltz. Oh man, you thought you could bring in the roastmaster and bribe him with scholarships and a reasonable food plan and just expect him to comply…well guess again! I’m out for blood, and for my first attack I’m gonna hit the administration right where it hurts.

The chairs at New Paltz suck. There, I said it. Now I’m not talking about the ones in the classrooms, those are great. I especially like the ones that look like regular four legged chairs, but they have wheels and you could bend back on them—you know the ones. No, the chairs I’m talking about are the ones in the dorms. Now for you pretentious jerks who “commute” and are too good to live here apparently, I’ll fill you in on what we grown-ups who don’t need our mommies still wiping our “pwecious” heinies for us are talking about. 

The chairs we are talking about are these “rocking chairs” that wobble about an inch forward and an inch back that are made of the oldest, creakiest wood that money could buy with a cushion as thin and as constantly uncomfortable as me in any given social interaction in middle school (I gained a few pounds in high school). 

Now I haven’t been to many other dorms but I am under the impression that everybody has this type of chair in their dorm and they are as furious as I am about them, except they don’t have the cojones to say anything about it. Well, my name is Eddie Parlato, and with God as my witness I will roast these chairs so hard that by the end of this review we will all be cooking marshmallows above their charred remains.

So how does one review a chair? Well just a fair warning, I’ve never really reviewed anything like this before so I guess just bear with me at some points. I mean sure, maybe I should have come in more prepared on how to truly analyze the craftsmanship of a chair, but you know, sometimes you just have to go into social revolution blind and figure it out as you go. You know, it’s like how the Sex Pistols never actually learned how to play music, they just made a band to take on the system and problems like…well, I don’t really know. I’m an American so I don’t need to know or care for that matter. 

Ok, no more screwing around beyond this paragraph. I am going to get into the nitty gritty of why this chair is really so bad. Not procrastinating at all, just really want to make sure I put as much time and care into reviewing this thing as possible. So here we go.

This chair sucks! Ok, maybe that was a bit too much out of the gate. This chair is bad at being a chair, well, I think it is at least. 

That’s a good question to lead off with, right? What makes a chair a chair, and how could a chair fail at being a chair. Well, the dictionary definition of a chair is: “a separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs.” So I guess in that sense this chair does succeed at being a chair, you could even argue the chair goes above and beyond at being a chair by having a “rocking” feature and a cushion as well. 

But I guess just falling into the definition doesn’t make something particularly good. For example, the definition of a person is: “a human being regarded as an individual,” which by those standards would make Adolf Hitler and the Verizon guy who switched to Sprint (that sneaky unloyal bastard) good people. 

So what I should describe in my review is what I look for in a great chair. Maybe I can just rattle off some of the things I think of in a bad chair and see how much the dorm chairs fall into the criteria.

Q: Is the chair uncomfortable?

A: Does a bear sh*t in the woods?

Q: Is the chair ugly?

A: Is “La La Land” a delightfully charming ode to the dreamers who make up the City of Angels?

Q: Is the chair past its prime?

A: Do I well up with so much rage when I walk into a Starbucks that I sometimes black out for a few seconds?

I guess that about sums it up then. I don’t know about you guys, but I think I just totally put these chairs in their place, huh?

I give the kids in the school about a week before they have one of those protests outside Humanities—you know the ones made up of three passionate seniors and 50 clueless freshman wanting to feel like woke college students—demanding we get new chairs. 

Oh boy, I could see it now. Me, Eddie Parlato, only 20 years old but already on the forefront of social revolution. Yep, not exaggerating one bit when I say this is going to change everything everywhere for the better.