Hasta La Ideas

Editor: Here in Part 4, Accidental Designer comes face to face with someone he’d been looking to avoid. Following that encounter, his subsequent talent for design accidentally gets him the attention of Hollywood!

Previously: The Accidental Designer, Part 3 – Is This Seat Taken?

“Hey man,” Rusty said. He introduced himself even though I already knew who he was. “I’ve been following you for the past few.”

“Oh, ah,” I said. What was there to say—what could I possibly say? All I could do was apologize. “Listen man, I’m, ah, sorry—so sorry that I took your, uh—”

Rusty cut me off. “What are you talking about, man?” he said. “Your chair looks awesome.” Your chair, he’d said.

“But I took the design from you,” I said.

“Yeah, you did, and I took the design from somebody else. And I made it a little bit better. And that guy I took it from, he took it from someone before him, and he’d made it a little bit better. This chair has been around for ages, dude,” he said. “And yours looks awesome.”

I was so relieved, and felt a huge weight come off of my shoulders. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should all go out and steal someone else’s designs. These days, things are copyrighted and IP’d and everybody’s all lawyered up. But that sling rocker chair had come into the world iteratively, like shipwrighting skills. People got better and better at it and the product improved through succession and collaboration. No one owns a shiplap joint and back then no one owned that chair (though I’ll betcha someone with lawyers does today).

Rusty and I remain good friends to this day. But before you think I got off easy for taking that design, well, I didn’t. Rusty might not have given a damn, but though I didn’t know it, the karma was going to come back around one day.

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