New employee moved an old office chair for a meeting and 3 coworkers immediately shouted ‘not that one’; months later, nobody can explain the rule but the manager warned him not to ask the boss

In most offices, if a chair is not broken, does not give you back pain and happens to be empty, most people probably would not think twice before sitting on it. But one Reddit user has a rather unusual, tempting office-chair story, where one particular seat has screamed an unwritten rule: nobody is supposed to sit in it, even though no one currently working there seems to know why.

The office chair nobody is allowed to sit in

The Reddit user, posting on r/work, said the chair sits at the end of a row near a window. Unlike the rest of the office, which uses identical black mesh chairs, this one is older and softer, and has apparently remained empty for years.


The strange part is that nobody seems to know the reason. The poster had been following the rule for months without ever questioning it. Those circumstances changed when a new employee who had joined in August casually wheeled the chair to a stand-up meeting because it was closer.

“Literally 3 people said not that one at the exact same time,” the poster recalled. The new employee returned the chair but later asked what the problem was. That was when the poster realized they could not actually explain the rule.

Nobody knows who the chair belongs to

The longest-serving employee on the floor reportedly joined in 2019 and said the rule was already in place when she arrived.

According to the poster, she had previously been told that the chair belonged to “someone,” but she did not know who. When she once tried to find out more, she got the impression that it was better not to keep asking.

That has only added to the mystery surrounding the otherwise ordinary piece of office furniture.

There is even a running joke that the chair is haunted, although the poster admitted it is difficult to tell how much of the joke is actually a joke.

The office manager made the mystery even stranger

The biggest twist came when the poster finally asked the office manager about it, who has been there for 15 years. And instead of explaining the chair's history, however, he immediately asked, “who told you to ask about that?” He then told the poster not to ask about it in front of the boss.

When the poster said nobody had told them to ask, the manager simply replied “okay” and went back to work.

For the Reddit poster, the manager’s reaction transformed a strange workplace tradition into something resembling a mystery thriller.

Reddit has its own theories about the chair

With all the revelation commenters supplied some elaborate explanations. One suggested that the chair belonged to the CEO's father, who had supposedly retired under mysterious circumstances and whose preferred seat nobody dared question.

The poster later clarified that the man's identity was not exactly a secret: he is alive, still occasionally comes to the office, and does not even have a specific cabin. He also does not sit in the mysterious chair.

Other commenters leaned further into the absurdity, joking that the situation resembled Goldilocks and the Three Bears, except that the person sitting in the chair might be eaten by “lizard people.”

The maroon chair remains empty, per the original post update, and perhaps the office's strangest unwritten rule.


Disclaimer: This story is based on a post shared by a Reddit user on r/work. The Economic Times has not independently verified the claims, details or events described in the post and cannot confirm their accuracy. The story is presented as a report of the Reddit user's account and the reactions it received online.