My local independent bookstore (The Booksellers at Laurelwood) is going out of business and we are all very sad about it. There are efforts afoot to reopen it in a smaller and less expensive location, but nothing has been settled yet. In the mean time, they are selling their stock at a discount, so I stopped in to see what I could pick up (and to support the store, and to say goodbye). One of the books I picked up is a fascinating read called 100 Million Years of Food, by Stephen Le.
I won’t give a synopsis here; you can pick it up if you are interested. But it has an afterword called “Rules to Eat and Live By”. These seem to me pretty sensible, except this one: “Keep Moving. … aim to walk … for at least two hours every day … sit for a maximum of three hours a day … New desk treadmills allow people in offices … to walk while reading or typing.”
Seriously? What kind of job is he talking about?
I am a cog in the machine. I am a systems analyst. I have a desk job. While at my desk job, I am not “typing” or “reading”. I am investigating, designing, researching, fixing. I use two monitors and if I had my druthers, it would be three. Maybe four. Four would be good. I’m supposed to be walking on a treadmill while I have a programming specification open on one screen, the program itself open on a second, the email from the person I’m on the phone with about the problem with a screenshot and an embedded spreadsheet open on the third, and an text session with a person halfway around the world who is having a completely unrelated problem open on the fourth.
I mean, seriously?
When people come up with these ideas, I cannot figure out what kind of desk jobs they think people have. Even those who recommend “standing desks” appear to have forgotten that people who have to stand all day (store clerks at checkout desks, for example) are highly prone to back, leg, hip, feet, and circulatory problems.
My local NPR station (WKNO) has a weekly spot from “The Church Health Center”. One of their talks last year was about employers doing various things to promote the health and well-being of their employees. Well, I’m all for that. Give us a break room where we can get away from our desks, access to a nearby gym (preferably with a swimming pool), and a walking path, if the campus is large enough. But the Church Health Lady also suggested “walking meetings” and “have your employees drop into a plank” (a yoga pose like doing a push-up, but without moving).
Oh sure. Give you a plank? The first time my boss suggested such a thing, he’d get a good view of my behind as I walked out the door and took employment with another firm.
Walking meetings. I’ve heard this suggestions from other. In a walking meeting, everybody in the meeting perambulates around the floor for the duration. Again, seriously? What do you think meetings are for, Church Lady and Others?
Presentation-type meeting: one person presents to the group. How are you going to do that? Beam the Powerpoint deck to our cellphones so we can all stare at it in miniature while we amble along and bump into one another?
Discussion-type meeting: people talk about the topics for which the meeting was called. Right. Seventeen people are going to wander about, all facing forward, and still be able to hear and understand everything that is said by everyone.
Working meetings: presentations and demos and whiteboards and presentation boards and we all brought our laptops and are using them. In a walking meeting, we’d each have to have a pushcart so we could trundle our laptops along, and there’d need to be at least one person wearing a whiteboard, like a sandwich board. How anyone will be able to write on that ambulatory whiteboard, I do not know, and for sure no one would be able to read anything that was written on it.
What about taking notes during these meetings? “Hang on there, everybody stop, I have to take notes, Joe, do you mind if I write on your back?”
And oh, Church Lady and Others, where do you expect these walking meets are going to occur? Shall we gabble on while perambulating around the cubicles where our coworkers are trying to work? Have you even considered the disruption to the work environment?
I am fully convinced that all these people who come up with these clever ideas for improving health in the workplace have no idea what it takes to work.