Ergonomics and Glasses

Yesterday I had the environmental safety people come and look at my work station to make sure I'm ergonomic. I found out that I have very bad tennis elbow from overuse of my mouse and I needed help. Boy did I learn a lot.

First of all, my keyboard was about 1/3 to the left of where it should be. You are supposed to line up the middle of the keyboard to the middle of the monitor. This looks pretty wacky since I have a big keyboard on my little laptop docking station. I also had my chair and monitor too low. So now I've crammed myself into the corner of my desk so that my right arm has as much support to be neutral as possible. This is not an easy position to get into because the wheels on the chair have to be just so so that I can get myself close.

Then he taught me a trick which I didn't know about how to increase the size of the fonts on what I'm reading. I've been using reading glasses for a few years and it never seems to work right. But now that my monitor is farther away than before, the glasses really aren't working right either. So I've zoomed the screen to probably 150% and can read it it for the most part. I'm still not happy about this because my spreadsheets just aren't going to work that way, but for general stuff it should work.

So what have I learned through all this. Most of us don't know what we are doing with our computer workstations and we need help.