A colleague of mine forwarded to everybody at the office a short story about a smart accountant who couldn’t develop a professional career because of RSI. Then I wrote the following and replied to all.
RSI is no laughing matter and it could happen to you. Yes, that’s you in the
corner.
One of the reasons why I am sticking to the ancient company laptop and
resist upgrading to a desktop is that I prefer the keyboard on the laptop:
it allows me to rest my elbows on my desk and without twisting my wrists. My
primary computer at home is also a laptop.
None of the standard keyboards in this office is very good. Even the
Microsoft “ergonomic” keyboard is not very good. For the ultimate ergonomic
keyboard, you might want to look at: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/. Although
I have not used one of these, I have read and heard many good things about
them.
It is expensive, at around US$300 (i.e. ~HK$2,400), but consider that a
quality keyboard lasts years, so assuming that you amortize it over the
period of three years, we are talking HK$800 a year, or HK$67 a month, or
HK$3 a day.
For comparision, a single consultation session with a professional
physiotherapist is around HK$300. A single session with your local
bone-setter (Tit-Da) is around HK$100. Not counting the factors of physical
pain and possible loss of income.
I also have an old IBM PC keyboard as reviewed here:
http://www.dansdata.com/ibmkeyboard.htm, which you might also want to look
into. I have it connected to my desktop at home, but I don’t use it very
often, as I often do my computing in late nights, and the noise it makes
would wake my lady and the kid. I imagine it would do well in the office
though, as it would no doubt give an (right!) impression that one is working
very hard.
One more thing: our keyboard trays are poorly designed, and might not house a non-standard keyboard. So as usual, caveat emptor.