About a year ago I bought a new computer. Its factory settings made the on-screen font
too small for easy viewing, so I enlarged the font size. But I overshot, and the enlargement turned
out to be extra-large. I couldn’t find a
happy medium. The font was either too
large or too small.
I left the font size at too-large and pushed the monitor more
toward the back of the desk. That wasn’t
good enough, so I scooted my chair back a couple of inches. Now the viewing distance and apparent font
size were as best as I could get them, optimal,
as some people would say.
(Devout grammarians would say that optimal is the adjective form; optimum
is the noun. Details, details. I chose optimal
because I don’t get many chances to use it and I liked the way it sounded.)
Except that now my right arm sagged off the desk, unsupported. A couple of days later, my right wrist began
to ache.
I switched the system over so that I could use the mouse
with my left hand, thereby giving my right wrist rest. (Say that fast: Right wrist rest.) But my left hand, throughout my lifetime, had
never done anything more demanding than scratch my nose and operate the turn
signal; it just didn’t have any self-control, and its movements with me in
charge were herky-jerky.
I found a list of keyboard shortcuts. My thinking was that I could use the keyboard
to take some of the effort away from my wrists.
But keyboard shortcuts didn’t do as much as I wanted, and, besides, using
them would be a step backward. Keyboard
commands were all that we had before the mouse and its buttons came along. No backward technology for me.
I reset the mouse for right-hand use, and with a piece
of scrap wood and an old towel fashioned a booster that I taped to the right
arm of my chair. Truly an inelegant piece of office furniture, but it
worked.
But the mouse was evil.
Now my right shoulder began to ache, an aggravation of an injury I had
done to the rotator cuff therein. Somehow
or other my chair had shifted to the left just enough so that I was not sitting
squarely in front of the computing machinery.
My mouse arm was coming in at an angle.
However so slightly the angle was, I was clicking on the bias.
What’s going on here is a series of events that a friend and
I talk about from time to time: That is,
it doesn’t seem possible to tackle the simplest of do-it-yourself projects
without encountering some form of additional difficulty. My friend and I have even formulated a sort
of algebraic shorthand that we use to identify the problem:
A leads to B+C which
leads to D+E+F which leads to G+H+I+J and so on.
That doesn’t really provide any solutions, but I feel better
now, and, as Forrest Gump said, “That's all I have to say about that.”
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