Stooping to the law of averages
An artist's impression of my perfect office
I’ve got a bad back at the moment. It’s been far worse in the past, so I’m not really grumbling, but I have however recently started my first office job in a long time, and yet again I’m faced with the perennial problem of having a chair and desk that force me to stoop. It’s not actually too bad at this place (the screen will allow me to raise it up to close to eye level, and the non-swivel chair I have is a lot more comfortable than most of the swivellers I’ve sat in), but it has reminded me of a point I’ve been meaning to make for a while.
Years ago, when attending health and safety training, we were told that you should be careful to make sure your seat is at such a height that your legs touch the floor comfortably. Why exactly this is good for your back I don’t know, but I presume somebody knew what they were talking about. For employees with legs too short to reach the floor (does Tom Cruise work in anyone’s office?) the advice is to put a box or, if you’re gullible, and expensive footrest on the floor.
However, at the opposite end of the spectrum you have those people who, like me, have legs so long that raising the chair up to a suitable position for the legs means the torso gets lifted up way above the table, almost as if a hot air balloon were involved. This means that I have to lean forward a lot to type, even more so if the screen height can’t be adjusted much.
The worrying thing though is that, because I am only a slightly taller than average man, these people consist of a sizeable portion of the population – a bit less than half of all men and some women too - all of whom have no option other than to stoop and wreck any chance they had of making it to retirement without suffering a slipped disk.
And finally to my point; this situation is caused by the fact that desks are made at a height to suit the average person, which is fair enough for the general office. But what frustrates me is that in IT (and probably other male dominated professions too) you don’t get higher desks, even though the average height of men is greater than that of the population in general. All these bluechip IT companies spend hundreds, if not thousands, per employee on getting them the latest, trendiest, most ergonomic chairs, keyboards, mice etc…, but it’s all for nothing if the desk is still too low.
When I run my own multi-million dollar software company (based on the success of a random muffin recipe generating website) I will proudly place at the top of my ‘work for us’ page
OUR TABLES ARE A FULL 3 INCHES TALLER
Beat that, Google!
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Tags: back pain, office furniture
omg ur such a chauvinist!!!!!!!111 why cant we all sit on the same kind of chair????? just cause you have a dick doesnt mean you should get to have a BIGGER CHAIR!?!?!? thats so unfair..
so offensive to us women. and to us shorties……. ill talk about this issue at the gender equality seminar you know. shame on you.
PS. ill help you with random muffin recipe generating website, as im pretty much a professional when it comes to random muffins
Well, a bigger desk actually… but it’s not chauvinist. If an industry attracts people to work for it who are demonstrably different from the average in some way it’s stupid/thoughtless to provide your employees with equipment designed for the average person, e.g. you wouldn’t buy normal length trousers for jockeys as the legs would flap around on their feet and look silly, and probably annoy the horse; you wouldn’t tailor catwalk clothes for the average sized woman as most models are tall and skinny (without getting into the reasons why the industry recruits mostly tall and skinny models in the first place). It just so happens that in IT the reason employees tend to be bigger is that there are far more men than women working in IT (I’ve only ever worked with one woman programmer, and about 40 men).
Rhys! You are right to complain about this. I have ran into similar problems and when I started my current job idly moaned about it to the secretary, who turned out to be the dept’s health & safety person. It turns out that they are legally obliged to buy you desk raisers! Now I have a really rather comfortable office, and all is well.
These are the ones you want them to get you:
http://www.ergonomics.co.uk/desk_height_adjustable_blocks.html
i love ergonomic chairs because they are more relaxing compared to conventional chairs “”