Ergonomics and Standing Desks

 Short story: I'm a 30 something year old engineer who has been working from a home office since the early 2000's and I've seen plenty of folks ruin their posture by not paying attention to basic ergonomic principles.

Step One: Find a website on ergonomics that speaks to your concerns and in your language. Some are folksy and some are highly technical. I prefer the Mayo Clinic's guide on Office Ergonomics, which is a site I refer to from time to time for other health-related questions that I have found reliable and informative.

Step Two: Find out what you can change for free, most ergonomic issues are removing bad habits. The vast, vast majority of ergonomic problems can be fixed for free just by understanding the limitations of a human body; and especially in regards to being sedentary for long periods of time. An alarm in your browser or on your phone can remind you to get up from your chair and you can choose the sound that most alarms make nowadays. Find something pleasant. My alarm noise is a whale sound.  I hear that and I do a little dance and walk to my sliding door, step outside, and walk around the garden with a watering bucket to see if anything needs water.

Step Three: Consider a standing or active treadmill desk. I have had a standing desk of sorts for over 10 years now and I grew back an inch in height and lost a good deal of weight just puttering around in front of it.

For those calorie counters out there: standing burns 2x as calories as sitting and walking can burn 5x the amount of standing even at a relatively slow pace.

Now you are going to find a lot of places that sell standing desks for 1000's of dollars and some of them are pretty nice desks but you don't need them to have a standing desk. What I've used since 2001 is a 40 year old drafting table with the legs extended almost to the max. I've tried this on a cheap one that I got for less than 30 bucks on clearance at Walmart and it works; also, they always seem to be on sale online with free shipping a few weeks after the start of school each year which is around this time.

So, I'll leave a link to a cheap drafting table if you found this information helpful and want to pick one up to try. I've been considering getting a treadmill desk but right now I just like taking walks around the city and getting out of the house.

Take care of your bodies whether you work from home or not.

The Koch Brothers' Shutdown of the US Government: AKA The Business Plot II

In 1933 a group of industrialists and financiers asked a former US Army General what it would take to stop the New Deal by force.  This incident was called The Business Plot and if you have not heard of it, you are not alone.  The plot has been written out of most history books; as slowly but surely the narrative of American corporations as winning the war against everything from Nazis to hunger has supersede the notion of corporations ever being politically motivated to gain power and garner protection through deceptive means.  During the Cold War this particularly American fascination with the benevolence of corporations, benefits of their products and services and harsh criticism for naysayers expanded into accusations of Anti-Americanism.  As if real, living, breathing people in questioning the utility of granting ever more rights and powers to immortal corporations which exist only as a convenient legal fiction as they took them away from workers and consumers were on the side of the USSR.  Accusations like this spiraled into McCarthyism.    

What the Koch Brothers have done with their shutdown of the US government is combing McCarthyism with the Business Plot.  The Tea Party is rife with accusations of the US worker who cannot get by on minimum wage in a 38 hour "part time job" as lazy and entitled while at the same time giving people the like of the Koch Brothers complete obedience to whatever strings they pull, it is Machiavellian in its brutal efficiency in making those who would be hurt most by their policies to blame for causing them.  The Working Poor have become the Tea Party's scapegoats and drudged up every time an argument is made in favor of Obamacare or the minimum wage or what is left of the social safety net.  

If the Tea Party is given their demands they will not stop with defunding Obamacare, they will privatize Social Security, they will eliminate the EPA and Dept. of Education, and do everything they promised the Koch Brothers they would do.  Because the Koch Brothers planned this shutdown in 2008 at the first mention of the Affordable Care Act.  The question is, how much do they want to take from the rest of us so we can have our country back?