I'm sitting near some "quiet rooms" at work these days, which should be familiar to anyone who has worked in an open-plan office. Basically, because open-plan sucks and allows the slightest noise to carry everywhere, there are meeting rooms provided that are big enough for a couple of people to use for short stretches of time for things like conference calls or stand-up meetings. Anything that might make distracting noise, really.
Okay, down to the point: chairs. These rooms often host meetings of four or more people, and only contain two chairs by default. My coworkers frequently fall victim to chair borrowing, since two of them are part-time. I, however, have managed not to have my chair kidnapped yet, and I think it's down to one simple difference: my chair has a jacket on it all the time.
If you're going to borrow a chair for a short meeting, you want one that isn't in use. That's the bare minimum of consideration in this situation. My chair with the jacket looks like it's always in use. To borrow it, you'd have to either take the jacket with you or remove it from the chair and place it on my desk. If you take the chair with the jacket, I will find you, like an overzealous interpretation of a Liam Neeson movie. Most people will be too courteous to move the jacket when there are other, undecorated chairs right there. So maybe that will work for you in a similar situation.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - Also, because of the design of our chairs, it keeps them from shearing off the buttons from my back pockets.
PPS - It's a weird and specific bonus, but it matters.
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