The Massage Chair that Locks You In

The Massage Chair that Locks You In – by Liam Sweeny.

Have you ever been in Sharper Image, or the former Sharper Image? We had one in Crossgates, and if you’re old enough to remember this, you’d know that was the place to park your ass into a massage chair. This was before you could find coin-operated street versions everywhere. You would go in, put on airs like you could afford to buy even the cheapest thing in there, which was a hundred dollars easy (just guessing; I never looked at anything else) and, if you were lucky, the super deluxe, Corinthian leather massage chair was free. And if it was, it was glorious. You could just fall asleep in the thing.

Well, one guy did. Not in Crossgates; in a shop in Japan. Fell asleep, and nobody seemed to notice him when they were closing up shop.

So the guy’s in the store, doors locked, lights out, phone in hand, Twitter in phone, going “Help!” And I don’t know if Twitter friends rescued this guy, or an internal alarm notified the police, but eventually they showed up.

It took ten cops searching him to make sure he wasn’t a shoplifter. I have to wonder; did each cop take a limb or quadrant to search, or was this like roadwork, where nine cops stood around and supervised one cop who actually searched him. I want to think they all searched him, like one cop searched him and found out he had a vestigial tail, and he told the other cops and they were like, “F**k you, no way,” and they all had to check it out.

Maybe if the massagee did have a vestigial tail, maybe it hurt, and that’s why he needed a massage? Ya think?

I always thought it would be cool to get locked in a store overnight. Like Will Smith in Legend, move mannequins around like they’re the ones working register. Do stuff to prank the people coming in in the morning. If you get locked into a store overnight, does that make you the only employee?

Jack Handey’s not the only one with Deep Thoughts.

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