wheresrhys

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!

I don’t want to end up like the giraffe in the picture: a crick-necked invalid with blotchy skin. As I grow older the blotchy skin is probably inevitable, but the crooked neck/back is avoidable I hope.

The trouble is that for a living I do a mixture of two things:

1. Bent double over a laptop, twisting my fingers at unreasonable angles in order to reach a keyboard shortcut
2. Bent double over a guitar, twisting my fingers at unreasonable angles in order to reach a wicked chord

Both these activities lead to my back muscles being tensed in an uncomfortable position, with little movement to get blood flowing to the muscles. As an added bonus, my finger muscles are also generally making the same kind of not particularly relaxed movements every day.

So what’s the antidote to all this physical self-abuse?

The idea I’m trying at the moment is juggling.

I’ve been able to juggle for a little over a year, and several of my friends are fanatical about it (working for little while in a backpackers hostel in Amsterdam is a surefire way to get people to help/force you to pick up the basics), but I hadn’t done very much since the first months when I first picked it up.

Recently, however, I realised that juggling is the antithesis of the activities that are determined to wreck my spine:

• Rather than crouching forward, to juggle you really need to stand quite upright; if you lean forward you end up throwing the balls forward, which eventually leads to either dropping them or running after them into traffic or something.
• More related to guitar playing this, but juggling requires very relaxed, fluid movements of the arms and shoulders. While fluidity is essential to playing rhythm guitar well, it’s impossible to avoid tensing up somewhat during the pacy irish reels we play – there simply isn’t enough time between beats to led your arm lollop along. So juggling should hopefully help counteract the stiffness I’ve been getting in my upper back.
• Despite the fact that you’re constantly grasping in the air to catch a ball, juggling requires you to relax your hand muscles too. Catching a ball when you juggle isn’t about holding it tightly; if anything, it’s closer to forming a cup shape for the ball to nestle into.

So, that’s the summary of why I think juggling might help. I’ll keep you posted on whether or not it is the miracle cure I’ve been looking for.