November 21st 2018

Today I finally took action and sorted out some monitor stands for my desk at work. See, I’ve got a bad back. At least part of the reason I have a bad back is that I have bad posture — particularly when I’m sat at my desk (either at work or at home). I was complaining about my bad back to a friend, and told her about my bad desk-posture, and she sent me this image:

I violate about five of those guidelines. I sit on my feet. My eyeline is about ten inches above the top of monitors, and I’ve never paid any attention on the angle of my hip joint. And that’s contributed to my bad back. I moan about it all the time, and today I finally did something to rectify it.

I did what any office worker does when they are even mildly inconvenienced by something equipment related that they could probably fix themselves if they tried: I called IT support. Dangerous Dave (our name for him, I don’t know why) sorted me out with a mount for each of my monitors. Et voila:

That extra height means I’m no longer peering over the top of the screen, or looking down on what I’m doing. My hope is that that will fix my neck, my back, and so on…

Now that I have a solution in place, it seems so simple. And I didn’t even really need Dangerous Dave. I just needed Dangerous Dave’s key to the supply closet. If I knew it was that easy I’d’ve done it two years ago!

In truth, I probably did know it was that easy, I just never bothered. As well as the new monitor mounts, he said that I should ask for a “Workplace Assessment” which, despite sounding really ominous, just involves the company checking that my workstation meets all of the guidelines that I basically outlined in that diagram above, and if it doesn’t, they’ll fix it for me.

Until tomorrow, I wonder if they’ll fix my back for me too.

Jacn