This is a chairy tale,
but a nasty one, a Grimm with a bad ending.
I hate office equipment.
I wish I could type inside my head, make the words float out on to the page or
even suspend themselves in mid-air like in Stephen Hall’s Raw Shark Texts. Instead
I’m left with typing, which is as awkward now as it was in the class I took in
high school. Imagine being a typing teacher all your life, trying to teach a
bunch of sullen kids a boring skill on the “qwerty” keyboard. This incredible anachronism, still almost universally-used, was designed when the typewriter was first invented and was meant to slow
typists down, because the only way to correct errors back then was to spit on
the page or cut the typo out with a sabre.
So. The chair. My office
chair always sucks, and I’ve been through a few of them. There is always
something seriously wrong with them. For years I played musical chairs with my
husband. “This thing is made of vinyl!” I’d complain in the summer, peeling my
shorts-clad legs off the seat like Velcro. So I’d get his fabric-covered one
for a while, the one with hard plastic arms that bored holes in my elbows. The
proportions just weren’t right on this thing, so I ended up with backache and
fatigue.
Not to mention eyestrain.
Let’s get into eyestrain, shall we? Being an author, I’ve had to edit
manuscripts. Back then anyway, we used a marked-up hard copy and a computer
copy and sort of fixed one using the other. So I needed some sort of stand to
hold my papers, double-wide, and still see my monitor.
I hunched and squinted as
I tried to see the damn monitor, jacked up abnormally high to make it just visible
while I shuffled papers. I got used to
agony in my lower back, the price of my art, perhaps. The truth is, I just
didn’t know how else to do it.
“This thing is a piece of
shit!” I’d cry in the winter, as the cold plastic froze my arms to my sides. So
once again we went through the old switcheroo.
This latest chair, a garage salvage with a nest of spiders living under it, created
more problems. I began to slide down farther and farther on my spine, at the
same time hunching forward because I couldn’t see my monitor at all. “Why do
you do that?” my husband would ask. “I need my paper stand.” “Why?” “I
might need to use it again.” “Why?”, and so on.
Another switch of chair.
Finally, when my bizarre posture had actually given me medical problems, I
decided I needed a Brand New Chair that would fix everything. Since we’re
cheap, and since they had a nice selection at a good price, we went to Costco.
Like the Three Bears, I had to sit in each one to see which of them was “just
right”.
Amazingly, it was the
second one I sat in. Like a first-class airplane seat (and how the hell would I
know what THAT felt like? I’m guessing), it just cradled my body, but kept my
back straight. The arm rests were lavishly padded to match the curve
of forearm and wrist and hand.
I! Loved! That! Chair! I loved it in the morning, I loved it in the
evening, I loved it –
Then I got it home.
My keyboard rests on a
tray that pulls out. Keeps the dust off n’ stuff (supposedly, but in reality my
keyboard is just as filthy as everyone else’s). Every time I pulled up to my
keyboard, the deluxe first-class arms of this thing pushed the tray back in.
But it got worse. The new
chair wouldn’t go down far enough. I almost felt like a little kid with her
feet dangling up off the floor. I could not believe this. “WHY WON’T IT GO
DOWN?” I screamed. “It’s as far down as it will go.” “This was designed for a
six-foot man!” “Why didn’t you notice that at the store?”
I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store. My ass noticed it felt good, that's all.
The deluxe padded arm-rests were worse than useless: they were a hindrance. You don’t sit back and
lounge in an office chair. You work from it. You keyboard, you mouse,
you do stuff. You roll it forward and back. (And that’s another thing.
That big plastic mat-thingie underneath the chair just kept sliding all over
the place. The casters made dents in it
that the chair kept falling back into, and they were about a mile back
from my computer. My wrist was in agony, like a toothache. Everything
was wrong.
“So (sarcastically), do
you want another chair?”
He had groused and grumped
about buying a proper plastic floor mat with those little teeth in it to grip
the carpet, refusing to even consider it because it cost something like $40.
00. I kept trying to explain it to him, how the casters were cutting into the
rug. “Then pull the plastic mat back,” he said. “I’d need to do it every five
minutes.”
I like my chair, I
really do, and if I had a circular saw, one of those things with teeth all
around it, it would be no more. Right now my tray with my keyboard on it has a shelf sitting on it, an old shelf left over from one of those really
tacky particle-board book cases. My monitor has one under it too, to jack it up
at least an inch to make up for the fact that the chair is too high up and
can’t be fixed.
Now I am nagging him to
PLEASE let me get a proper mat so the thing won’t slither and slide all over
hell’s-half-acre like Bambi on ice. He gets this squinched-up, disapproving
look on his face (I can read his mind: “God, what a waste of money”), doesn’t
even make eye contact with me because I know he does not understand my needs.
He complains all the time
that I spend too much time at the computer. I have this little habit of
writing. In my entire life, I have had maybe two people understand what I do,
and my husband is not one of them. He thinks I play at it. Everyone thinks
I play at it, that I pretend and delude myself that I’m “doing something”. So
how can my back hurt, I wonder? If it isn’t even “work”? And why won’t I come
out of that room and go to Costco with him to look at bulk sausages and stuff?
To all but those two
people, ANYTHING would be better than doing what I do, the waste of time. Even
having books out is futile, isn’t it? Some sort of Hemingway fantasy? (And
didn’t Hemingway end up shooting himself in the head?). Why do you need a
special chair, for God’s sake, and a plastic floor mat with little
dit-dots on it so the chair won’t buck and heave under you like a wild horse?
I threw my keyboard at
the wall once, so that the underside is secured with masking tape. I have
slammed innumerable mice, and thrown a few, which is satisfying because the
cover pops off and the battery goes flying across the room. I can’t throw a
chair, can’t lift the thing, would like to throw a husband but he is rooted seventeen
feet into the ground. Not getting it.
While I sit there mousing and hurting.
Mousing and hurting.
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