Ergonomic Crisis

As a professional programmer by trade, I spend most of my days sitting in front of a computer.  Many of my hobbies put me right there in the same chair too.

Every few years, I go through an ergonomic wake-up call – the really depressing, getting-old variety like “oy, my <body-part> is <depressing-pain-symptom> from <computer-activity>”.

Some typical examples:

“oy, my left hand is numb from trackball-clicking”
“oy, my right-shoulder is getting tendonitis from mousing”
”oy, my back is killing me from sitting all day”

When my years of right-hand mousing starting torquing my shoulder, I switched to left-hand trackballing.  Now that’s been a few years, and I’m getting lots of bad left-hand pains and numbness.  A couple years ago, I went to the sadistic pins-and-needles doctor who poked me and sent electric shocks through the nerves in my arm (fun for about a minute, then downhill after that).  The conclusion was that I don’t have carpal tunnel, yet, but it’s obviously some form of repetitive strain injury.

Clearly the human body isn’t designed to sit in a chair all day, typing.  I’m only 40 and my body is falling apart.   I try to take breaks during the day, but programming requires an obsessive mind – the kind of focus that has you sitting in your chair for long hours not noticing that you’re freezing cold, starving, dry-eyed and tired.  I go to the gym a couple evenings a week, which really does help, but it just isn’t enough.

This obviously affects my ability to enjoy guitar, keyboard, woodworking, even holding hands with my kids.  It’s a sad moment when you have to tell your four-year old daughter, “Ouch sweetie, please don’t hold my hand so hard- it hurts my fingers”.

I definitely need an ergonomic overhaul.  I’ll write up some of my experiments in the next few weeks.