As part of our efforts to sneak healthy changes into our lifestyle, last weekend my husband made each of us a standing desk to use in our offices here at home. While he uses a desktop with two large screen monitors, I use one large screen monitor and my laptop.
When he first set up my system he tried to convince me to let him hook up a separate keyboard , so that I would just use my laptop as a second screen. This idea I rejected on the grounds that none of the keyboards we tested “sounded right”.
My husband has been with me long enough to know that there’s no response to something like that, so he let the matter drop. But after almost a week of working up so high my wrist and elbow really hurt, so I just called him at work and asked if we could go look at keyboards tonight.
“OK,” he said, in the tone of someone who is excited that I finally came around, but is wise enough not to push.
“I know I haven’t wanted to do this before, but I’d really like this sharp pain in my elbow to stop.”
“”Mmm. Can I make a suggestion?”
“Um,” I said, suspecting what was coming, “should I stop?”
“Yes,” he replied. Move your laptop back down and just sit for today.”
“OK,” I agreed, unlike my behavior in previous similar situations.
So I’ve been happily working away on my old desk, enjoying the reprieve from arm pain until I caught myself thinking, “Man, why is my neck hurting so badly?”
You know that skill that you supposedly develop as you grow-globilization, maybe-where you learn something important from a situation and are then able to use that lesson in new situations? Well apparently I don’t, because it took me MANY MANY LONG MINUTES until I realized that if I moved my laptop down a level, perhaps I should move my screen down as well.
No one tell my husband, okay?
I’ve done things like that. I almost bought a new camera once because my old one had stopped working. Fortunately the next morning I realized it had stopped after I recharged and reinserted the battery. Yep, when I put the battery in right it worked just fine. 😀