I got my Steelcase Think office chair in the mail yesterday, at long last. As a back-pain sufferer who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, I've been thinking about, researching, and generally fussing over ergonomic chairs for a long, long time, all the while sitting miserably on a cut-rate Office Max chair with a seat that made my butt ache after about 10 minutes.

In the end, I went with the Think, for four reasons:

1. It's aesthetically simple and elegant. There are lots of good ergo chairs out there, but you wouldn't believe how fussy some of them look.

2. It's about as environmentally advanced as any consumer product available today. It's 99% recyclable, easy to disassemble, and best of all, Cradle-to-Cradle certified. In general, Steelcase is an environmentally enlightened company.

3. It's at the lower end of the decent-ergo-chair price scale, at $600. That may seem like a lot for a chair, but amortized over the number of minutes I spend in it, it pays off handsomely. Anyway, the Allsteel #19 is around $1200, and hell, Herman Miller Eames chairs run up to $2200.

4. It's ergonomically sound, but doesn't require 500 adjustments to get up and running. In fact, aside from seat height, there's just one knob, with four settings. There's a weight balance mechanism that automatically adjusts support based on weight and position, and tensors in the back that adjust automatically to shape and posture. It's designed to conform to your movement, and keep you moving, which is ergo task No. 1.

If you buy through Office Environments, you can also choose custom fabric. Mine is "cinnamon," roughly like the one pictured here.

Obviously, having had only one day to test it out, I can't pass full judgment yet. But so far it's a dream. Steelcase, my ass thanks you! And you can quote me on that.