It finally happened. A plastic stool succumbed under the weight of my weightiness. Luckily I had prepared for this moment, with a nightly routine of squats, pulling chairs away from myself, graceful backward rolls, observing others in similar incidents, and practising my “a chair didn’t just break from under me, let’s get on with the meeting” face, it’s a very specific look.

Most activities that involve sitting in Vietnam will likely be facilitated by a plastic stool if anything at all. Plastic stools range from the tiny plastic stool which is really just the lazy man’s squat to a full adult sized chair with a backrest. The one I had was a tall variety without a backrest, similar to the top most picture. They also tend to come in red, yellow and green but i don’t think i’ve ever seen black.

It was kind of a lucky break I had though. I was coming to the end of a meeting and was just chatting casually with colleagues when the *crack* sound came which you wouldn’t hear in a crowded Little Italy restaurant or Dinh Liet Bia Hoi for instance. This triggered my training instincts to tense up my quad muscles and go into a kind of tall squat formation. As the crumbling of the chair leg occurred I was able to remain reasonably upright, I thought about preforming a backward roll, but figured it would just be showing off and rather unusual for my colleagues to see, then came the reflex to in a flash replace the broken stool with a fresh one and lay on the “a chair didn’t just break from under me, let’s get on with the meeting” face. My colleagues didn’t know what hit ‘em as the conversation flowed naturally onto why I wasn’t married and how that made me ugly and pitiable.