In the image (often seen on bumper stickers and T-shirts) the long-dead woman is a skeleton covered in cobwebs. It adds to the poignancy of what has befallen her that she's usually depicted on a hard, old, park bench. Monday's function at Dream Design on cosmopolitan Yallourn Street was all about waiting and about the things we must park ourselves on while doing it. How much more bearable we would find all of the waiting there is to do in this life (not just the tragic women waiting for a perfect man but all of waiting to see our quacks, to catch planes and charabancs) if we could do our waiting on chairs designed to take account of true human shapes.

The occasion was the launch of a new range of waiting-room seating. Katy Gallagher is a serial launcher of almost everything known to ACT man but this was the first time, she laughed to us, that she'd ever been asked to launch a chair! As she spoke, in front of her there stood an elegant, black and white waiting-room chair wrapped in an elegant black and white ribbon she was to cut.

Earlier, with the mixed-sex barber-shop quartet Shiraz crooning appropriate airs such as The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the background, we asked the company's boss Andrew Hurst why we were gathered.

"We're launching a waiting-room chair, waiting-room furniture that's been designed especially for waiting rooms. We invited nine local interior designers and architects ... and we've now got nine different models and all the seatings' fabrics are from nine different suppliers."

But why, we probed (for one never knows when a Walkley Award may lie below a bland-looking subject) is there a need for very special waiting-room furniture? Won't any old thing do?

I think I saw Hurst wince a little at this insensitive notion, and he went on to explain, in his talk with me and then in his little speech later, that we have so much waiting to do in this life that perhaps it ought to be quality waiting. Perhaps we should think of our various forms of waiting as waiting occasions. Good furnishing on and in which to do our pausings will give waiting some flair. He imagines the range being used wherever we wait, for doctors, psychologists, at mechanics' premises, and perhaps, for there is one seat made for "wider" folk, at gymnasiums where there may be body builders of unusual proportions.

Another virtue of the range, with its great permutations, is that interior decorators redesigning business premises will now probably be able to find waiting-room furnishings that blend with wall colours and carpets. Yes, all of us has have a doctor or dentist or aromatherapist whose waiting room is a shocking clash of things.

Although, at 69, I am far too old to still be haunting a young person's profession, there are occasions when my great age enables me to make sense of things that would bewilder a fledgling reporter. Hurst explained to me that he'd first gone into business in the 1980s with waterbeds in the waterbed boom years. I knew what waterbeds were. Indeed, every pad I lived in the 1980s (people like me always lived in pads) had waterbeds. Being on them felt and sounded (especially when anything vigorous was going on) like being in a dinghy on a choppy lake.

Hurst recalls that when the double water bed boom faded, he went into the manufacture of single water beds. As he said this, the single water bed sounded to my ears such an incongruous thing that I realised how, in the '70s and '80s, waterbeds were always thought of as furnishings that were meant to be adjuncts of the free-love, spendin'-the-night together hippy lifestyle. A single waterbed still sounds, to my 1970s ears, as pointless as a single sock, the kind of bed in which a tragic woman might wait in vain, gathering cobwebs, for a perfect man.

Being elderly is also of assistance when it comes to matters of ancient music. Shiraz had written a special song for the launch, based on the Everly Brothers' 1959 hit All I Have to Do Is Dream and I not only knew exactly who they were but knew the 1959 song Drury had adapted, Dream, word for word.

It is a lovely song (albeit in one sense a little wet) about how teenage boys such as the Everlys can get very close to an unavailable girlby dreaming about her.

Hurst explained it is part of the design of the new range that they don't have that back-of-the-chair crevice in which we lose things that slip out of sight as if they've fallen between the lips and into the secret mouths of furniture trolls. We thought this was rather a shame (because one finds such interesting things wedged in old furniture) and Hurst agreed that, yes, because his business reupholsters furniture his people are alway finding nice relics.

"We've found wedding rings, TV remotes, and once a letter from the First World War!"