Paperstone – Office life, work and fun

Office furniture sets the world on fire

By Paperstone on March 1, 2007 in Office Furniture

The story of a solitary torched office chair has caused national intrigue and an international campaign to find the owner.

Last Friday, the Westmorland Gazette published a short article on its website detailing how fire crews and the police had been called to a small blaze on a green in Kendal, which later transpired to be the offending piece of office furniture.

Barely three paragraphs long, the innocuous story was picked up by an internet user and quickly escalated into an email joke.

However, while raising a number of laughs along the way, it has also created a wave of international interest in the chair and the person/s responsible for setting it alight, with people as far away as Dubai reading the article.

The Westmorland Gazette website received its biggest number of hits for the week thanks to the story, with hundreds of people logging on to read the article.

Moreover, many people chose to leave a comment on the site, with some simply claiming that the article was "scraping the barrel" and others bemoaning the use of firemen and police to deal with a simple piece of office furniture.

However, some went to great lengths to write poems to "vent their anguish" and others blamed terrorism for the blaze.

Evidently most, if not all, of the responses had their tongues firmly in their cheeks but, such was the impact that the burning office furniture had, the Westmorland Gazette was forced to publish follow-up articles trying to trace the owners.

Westmorland Gazette editor Mike Glover and Andrew Daniels, author of the original article, have even been interviewed live on BBC Radio Cumbria about the office chair.

While our office furniture might not have such a strange story attached to it, at Paperstone we can furnish your office with top of the range desks, filing cabinets, bookcases and, yes, chairs.

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