Last year I had pain in my hip and legs, to the point I was developing a limp. Sitting anywhere but the couch was painful. I spent several months in physical therapy and figured it was a combination of me sitting too much, being overweight and hitting middle age. I did the exercises and tried to stay away from my desk as much as I could (difficult, given how much I use the computer). Eventually it stopped, in part because I spent more time away from my desk.
Shortly after all this, I decided to create a new writing area for myself upstairs. Downstairs I have a desk and PC. The problem is that I get constant interruptions from the kids (and birds) when I work there. Since the PC is faster than my laptop and only has a single screen, it’s also 99% more likely that I’ll goof off and multitask on my PC. It was also getting annoying to constantly switch files from PC to laptop and back whenever I went to a cafe to write (I do back up, but don’t use the cloud to synchronize Scrivener).
So I created a second work area in my bedroom consisting of a folding table and chair, and my laptop. It’s helped reduce some of my aforementioned frustrations. A couple of weeks ago I sprung for a proper chair to use upstairs. I got the same $99 model I had downstairs from Costco:
I’m short. Not ridiculously short, but enough that it makes a difference. As soon as I assembled the chair and sat down, I realized my mistake. The chair is too high. Even on the lowest setting, I can’t put my feet flat on the floor. You’d think I’d remember this, having a second model downstairs, but I’d been using the folding table upstairs for months, and when I used by PC downstairs I got used to propping my feed up on the subwoofer. I hate making returns, so I stuck a box under my table to prop up my feet and called it adequate.
Two weeks later, the pain in my leg/hip came back with a vengeance and I finally put two and two together. My pain last year began after I got a new office chair downstairs, vanished when I stopped using the desk and switched to a folding chair upstairs, then returned when I got a duplicate desk chair upstairs. Ergonomics!
Now, I’m not slamming this particular model. It’s a good chair. It’s just too damned high for short little me to put my feet flat on the floor, and apparently that’s enough to really screw up my hip.
Looks like I’ll have to bite the bullet and try to return my new chair.
