Tools of the Trade: The Pocket Chair
Although I’ve never made a purchase, I’m a sucker for informercials and “as seen on TV” stores, I finally could no longer resist. Was at Walgreen’s the other day looking for Halloween stuff, and I found a certified tool of the trade for vinyl collectors and diggers who like to go to swap meets and flea markets: The Pocket Chair!
Got this for 10 bucks. It fits in a pretty small pouch, and while it COULD fit in your pocket, it probably wouldn’t be that comfortable. But with the handle on the pouch, it’s extremely easy to carry around.
If you’re not familiar with the painful process of looking for records at flea markets, let me break it down. Often, vendors will have crates or boxes of records on the ground instead of on tables. So you have to kneel down, often for quite a long time. There’s two options: Squat or actually get on your knees. Either way, after about 5 minutes of holding the same position, you get tired. You can switch back and forth, change weight to different feet/knees, but either way, it sucks. You can try utilizing another crate or box to sit on, but then you’re sitting on records….not cool. As you can see here, sometimes it’s not easy sifting through a stack of records. You can spend hours going through one vendor’s piles of gems. Enter the pocket chair. Next time you’re at a swap meet and see something like this, pull out your pocket chair, and laugh at the other collectors cursing their knees for getting scraped on the cement.