By Khadi Madama
Quick-Seat Chair Wellness Coordinator
Recently, I’ve started watching as many old train movies as I can find on YouTube. Most recently I’ve watched Murder on the Orient Express. There’s something both exciting and cozy about train movies. However, they all have something in common. Tight spaces. I started thinking about the movie sets and wondered how on earth they even filmed in such close quarters. The portly Hercule Poirot could barely fit into his own cabin with his mustache kit!
“I was sitting on my little seat at the end of the corridor.” Said Pierre, the porter on the Orient Express. The real murder in this Agatha Christie movie/book adaptation starring David Suchet, is the lack of space anywhere except in the dining car even on this famous and legendary train. I, too, have written a fictional story that takes place on this iconic train, but when I imagined the scenes where all of the action was to take place, I imagined them big enough for two people to at least be able to pass by each other in the corridor without getting married. That being said, the porter, who must sit at the end of the train corridor, gets little consideration. He is stuck on a small wooden chair unless someone needs him, and because of space constraints it is a very small chair. As a fan of and writer about Quick-Seat Chair, I am distracted watching the movie by thoughts running through my head that, if only they had a Quick-Seat Chair, Pierre would be sitting at a height that is even 1/2” higher than a typical theatre seat (and more comfortable), and that seats amply, holding up hundreds of pounds of weight safely while secured to the wall-and self-closing-for those times when he needs to get up and out of the way quickly. Quick-Seat Chair would have paved the way and saved the day. One paradox is how, in the Peter Ustinov version of Murder on the Orient Express, people can barely squeeze by one another, yet 12 people can all fit together into the victim’s tiny cabin to commit the crime. Ah, the mystery of space. Even NASA hasn’t quite solved it yet. But we have solved the mystery of temporary seating in space constrained areas and I truly wish that someone from the movie production company would have called us to talk about how to solve Pierre’s seating problem. A brown Quick-Seat Chair folded up against the wall, sporting the Orient Express logo would have looked very smart indeed and offered an extra few feet of needed space.
The Mystery of the Blue Train, also a movie/adaptation by Agatha Christie, had the same problem. The Blue Train is another real life train with real life space problems and long corridors like most, where anyone would welcome a Quick-Seat Chair along the way if the train’s speed and sudden jostling caused someone to need a good sturdy seat.
Sometimes, I think that people who design passenger trains are people who have never been on one, but have been in restaurants, which is why the dining car scenes are always spacious. No mystery about that. And there is no mystery about how and where and on what to seat people, when Quick-Seat Chair is on-board.
Quick-Seat Chair. Temporary Seating That Closes Itself.
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