Whoever sits down last gets the arm rest, and whoever gets the arm rest has to actually get up if anyone needs a glass of water, and nobody ever volunteers, and honestly the amount of passive aggressive shuffling that happens over a sofa cushion in this office is embarrassing for a group of adults who claim to write about furniture for a living.
It almost didn’t happen, this sofa. It sat in the maybe pile for months, mostly because leather has a reputation for being the thing your uncle owns, stiff and shiny and slightly hostile to sitting on for more than twenty minutes. Someone had a bad experience with a pleather one in a rental once, cracked at the seams within a year like it had been personally offended by daily use, and that memory did a lot of damage to leather’s case around here. It took an actual sit, cushions sinking properly rather than that showroom bounce, to get anyone to admit it might not be a mistake.
Now it is the single most fought over object in the building. There is a spot, the left end, slightly deeper than the rest for reasons nobody can explain and everyone appreciates, and getting there first has become a genuine sport. One person apparently arrives twenty minutes before everyone else on Mondays purely to claim it, which we only know because someone else finally said something, out loud, in a meeting, about people creeping in early like it’s a queue for concert tickets, and nobody denied it, which honestly says everything.
The leather itself has gone from stiff to properly broken in, softer in the seat where four years of actual bodies have been, and it has taken every coffee ring and one memorable red wine incident without holding a grudge, which is more than can be said for the rug underneath it.
Wipe it, forget about it, move on. That is the whole trick and it is a good one.
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Nobody warns you that leather gets cold in an unheated office in January, so the first ten minutes of any winter morning meeting involve someone perched on the very edge like they’re not quite committing, before eventually giving in and sitting back properly once body heat does its work. We should probably have seen that coming.
We did not.
It creaks now, in one specific spot, in a way that’s become almost comforting, like the building acknowledging you’ve sat down. It has survived a dropped laptop, several very long lunches nobody meant to have, and at least one nap that ran well past anyone’s comfort with admitting it happened during work hours.
It went from maybe to would not want to be without somewhere around month three, and none of us can point to the exact day. We just noticed one Monday that the fight over the left end had gotten worse, and took that as proof enough.
