Remember when…? – Taller

When I was in elementary grades, we had desks that were attached to the chair. It was all one big, heavy desk. I guess they were convenient to prevent moving the chairs, making noise, or even tipping the chairs backward (and risking a fall). Since those desks were "one size fits all", they all needed to be adjusted, one by one at the beginning of the class.

Loving the height

One thing that, as a kid, I loved to do, was to swing my legs under my chair. But this was only possible if the chair was slightly higher than the length of my legs otherwise, my feet were automatically touching the floor.

How can we do that?

Apparently, I was not the only one who liked that feeling of dangling feet, but since the chairs were to be measured to each student's height, how can we do that? (especially since it was likely that we would even grow up more during the school year).

Let's cheat

Many students actually found a trick. When the janitor would come, he would adjust the height of the chair based on the height of our knees. The way to do that was to stand beside the chair, and the janitor would raise or lower the chair to match our knee height. So, how did we do it? We would slightly stand on our toes. At least, lift our heels a bit. The janitor was likely aware of that trick so he would often check our feet before the final adjustment of the chair, so we really needed to keep our shoes on the floor, even if our heel was slightly off. It might have meant only a half inch difference, and maybe, by the time we had gone through a few months of the school year, that "fake" half inch was probably long gone, it was still a challenge to try to "cheat on the janitor".

Did you ever have some tricks in school to get what you wanted? What was it? What did you want to get that was supposedly not allowed? Share your story in the comments below.

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