The problem with The Chair is that it is too comfortable. It is a comfort zone, a place of luxury and casual wealth which placates the rare sparks of my mind. Where is work done in our day? Once in a while I’ll see a profile of an influential thinker at an industry-leading company, the face behind the brand name, the mover of markets who gloriously labored in sphynxian silence and corporate anonymity until a print magazine found the individual and published a 12-page profile. You might imagine that such an important person has a workplace of some eccentricity — an 80" television or a custom-made aquarium shaped like an obscure Pacific island — but usually the person’s place of work is just a desk with a computer, a place which is, by appearances, the same as any desk at any similar place of employment. The value of the work performed there is said to rise to a higher level, to be of greater financial value to the employers and of greater value to society, but are not the machinations the same as the obscure laborer slaving away on data entry? Does a corporate celebrity not punch the same keys as their "underlings"? They do, but we are told it is done with more prescience, education, and a special form of contextual erudition known as “vision”. My corporate youth was filled with puzzlement over authority and rank at the workplace, especially the language used to express it. A particularly stark memo from my boss said that a document had been sent to "the people upstairs" even though said people were actually downstairs from us. They were "upstairs" from us not in physical reality but in the corporate pile. Employees whose compensation was considerably higher than their peers and even their bosses were described as "in the stratosphere." Spatial comparisons to corporate rank were funny to me, not for any cleverness they exhibited but because of what they revealed about the speaker’s anxieties and disillusions. An assistant once described a director as "BIG". She mockingly rolled her eyes and waved her hands, doing a little razzle-dazzle dance with her fingers to illustrate what BIG meant to her.