Someone brought a small footstool into the office, plonked it under a desk “just to try it,” and by Thursday it had caused a proper argument, the kind that involved raised voices over something that cost less than everyone’s lunch that day. The stool itself is unremarkable, a squat little thing, low enough to slide a foot onto without thinking. The argument was never really about the stool. It was about whose feet the stool was for.
Because that’s the thing nobody warns you about with a small footstool. It looks like a neutral, generous object, room for everyone, and then within about four days one person has quietly claimed it and everyone else is stepping over it like it’s landmine adjacent. In this office it’s whoever gets to the good chair first, because the good chair plus the stool equals a setup so smug looking that the rest of us have started resenting a piece of furniture the size of a large cat.
The love side of this argues that it’s the only object in the building that makes an ordinary chair feel like an event.
Feet up, shoulders down, something shifts in your whole afternoon. One of us has genuinely started timing meetings around whether the stool is free. Another has taken to hiding it behind a filing cabinet on Fridays, which we all know about and nobody has confronted, because confronting it would mean admitting we care this much about somewhere to put our feet.
The dislike side is louder than you’d expect for something so small. It gets kicked.
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It migrates. It ends up under a desk three rooms away and then someone accuses someone else of “footstool hoarding,” a phrase that has now entered the group chat permanently. It’s also, if we’re honest, the exact height for stubbing a toe on at speed, and at least two of us have done that this year alone, swearing loudly enough that a client once asked if everything was okay.
The felt tip incident deserves a mention. Not a toddler this time, a marker pen left uncapped near the stool for one lunch break, and now there’s a faint blue stripe across one corner that nobody claims responsibility for and everyone blames on someone who wasn’t even in that day. We’ve decided it adds character. We’ve also decided that’s the sort of thing people say when they don’t want to buy a new one.
So love it or leave it, genuinely split down the middle here, and the argument that started this whole thing has never actually been resolved. What we can agree on is that whoever gets to the good chair first also gets the stool, no negotiation, no rota, pure feral office law. It’s a small object causing disproportionate feelings, which if you think about it is probably the best compliment furniture this size can get.
