Nancy Solomon's new office arrangement, courtesy of Saint Louis University Medical Center.
You’d think if you worked surrounded by medical experts, you’d spend your days in perfect alignment. But Nancy Solomon, director of communications at Saint Louis University Medical Center, had kept her bad habit of tucking her phone in the crook of her neck during interviews, and she wasn’t even using the ergonomic-height slide-out keyboard tray whose previous user must’ve eaten a lot of crackers at lunchtime.
Two physical therapy students evaluated Solomon’s work space, watched how she moved, asked about her routine. Then they tipped her seat forward—“My heels now hit terra firma,” she reported—and angled the armrests so she could rest her elbows on them and avoid the tension of a constant shoulder shrug.
She’s dusted off the keyboard tray. The students told her to stop using the little feet on her keyboard (she thought that helped, but it’s actually better flat), and they brought both monitors into her line of vision, so she’s not twisting to read one of them. Her wrists now rest on a padded ledge, reducing stress on tendons, ligaments, and nerves, and her mouse is closer so she’s not reaching for it.
Solomon says the stiffness in her shoulders eased in the first few days of her new set-up. She’s even got a headset now, for long interviews. She still can’t bring herself to use the speaker: “I have this weird perception that I’ll come across as more important than I am if I do,” she says. “It’s my craziness.”
All these positive changes made us wonder—why are we all so fragile now, suffering carpal tunnel and other horrors from seemingly light “desk work,” when our ancestors pounded heavy manual typewriters and lugged them around? Is it just that we’re more aware of our pain?
“There is definitely more awareness now, but there is also a more sedentary lifestyle,” says one of the p.t. students’ mentors, associate professor Chris Sebelski. “Technology brings ease. There’s not as much running around—you don’t even have to get up to go to a printer; you can have one right under your desk. We’re in the same position for much longer, and the positions we attain are very similar.”
Take keying: “People tend to rest their hands on the edge of the keyboard or desk and just glide their fingers back and forth, pivoting off their wrists. Your finger muscles are very, very small, and they weren’t designed to do that.”
Sebelski also sees people too close to their screens or too far away from them. “The screen should touch your fingertips when you stretch your arms out.” If you wear glasses, and the screen’s too close, you have to tilt your head back in a weird position; if your screen’s too far away, you’re hunched forward like a turtle, squinting to make out the type. “And oh, by the way, you have a 30-minute deadline, so you’re going to make your neck muscles hold your head in that position for the whole 30 minutes.”
We’re often holding our bodies in a state of tension, she adds, because there are such high demands for productivity and speed. Technology makes it easy to be productive, so the demands on us increase, and suddenly our jobs are hard again.
Tomorrow: The Impossible Quest for the Ergonomic Chair
