Sit Up Straight and Read This: the Message Is Ergonomics

So here we were at the office, your plucky squadron of Times editorial employees, pretending to be working on newspaper stories while actually writing the Great American Novel without the boss finding out, when the message flashed across the top of our computer screens:

Stand up, stretch your neck and breathe deeply.

Huh? Who said that? Come on, what’s the gag?

I knocked the message off the screen and got back to the task of writing the nov--I mean, the column.

Thirty minutes later I’m staring vacantly at the screen and another message flashed:

A set of thumb bends will relax your hands.

I have seen the future, and its name is ergonomics. It’s the biggest thing since plastics.

Turns out that our great newspaper is in the trial phase of a program designed to make our lives at work as relaxing and enjoyable as humanly possible, short of having valet parking and catered lunches.

The messages, which are coming every half an hour, are sent from the folks in Ergonomics, which I had thought until recently was a department created to counsel people who slouched at their desks. A couple years ago, the ergonomics people would show up every so often and talk to us about our posture while sitting at our desks and how we shouldn’t cock our heads and squeeze the phone between our shoulder and ear while typing.

There may or may not have been a slide show presentation, I can’t remember. But the advice was excellent, because the neck and shoulder pain that used to hound me has disappeared completely.

The field must now be expanding into thumb bends and deep breathing. If they could incorporate chanting and humming, I predict it will be gangbusters in California.

Realizing I was being left in the scientific dust, I looked up ergonomics in the dictionary. The word apparently dates to 1949 and, for you detail freaks, can be singular or plural in construction. Someone who specializes in the field is an er-GON-o-mist, although I think if you said, “My friend is an ergo,” people would still know what you were talking about.

My dictionary defines ergonomics as follows: “An applied science concerned with the characteristics of people that need to be considered in designing and arranging things that they use in order that people and things will interact most effectively and safely--also called human engineering.”

Wow. Over the last 43 years, that has evolved into thumb-bending and deep breathing.

In going to the computer messaging, The Times’ ergos (or, would that be ergoes, Mr. vice president?) must have thought their advice was falling on deaf ears.

Their strategy seems to be borrowed from Madison Avenue. In other words, they’re applying the same rules to our work habits as advertisers apply to buying habits: Bombard people with the product and eventually the message will get through.

Ergoadvertising will soon be appearing in dictionaries everywhere.

You know what, it works. Although my hands were perfectly comfortable, I began doing a set of thumb bends right at my desk as soon as I saw the message--a practice I heretofore had confined to the privacy of my own home.

But I had been doing it wrong all the time. Like a dunce, I was just bending the joint up and down. But the ergos leave nothing to chance. I sallied over to my mailbox and found a sheet of illustrated instructions on how to do all the exercises, including the thumb-bend.

Their illustration clearly states that the thumb should be flexed to the base of the little finger and held there for fiveseconds. Then, the fingers should be spread apart, with the palm upward, and held for five seconds. Repeat five to 10 times.

I did it their way, and I have to admit, my thumb feels replenished.

They’ve won me over. Their methodology is brilliant. I’m so convinced that ergoadvertising works that I’ve cooked up my own little message to send to management, to flash on their screens at 30-minute intervals:

Stock more powdered-sugar doughnuts in the cafeteria.

If that works, how about:

Reward staff with champagne brunch.

As for the distant future, we’ll know that Times management is sincere about wanting to help the staff when we get messages that read:

Try this: It was a dark and stormy night.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.