RODENT FREE

Dick Pountain/28 August 1997/Idealog 37

I've just made a very major change to my computing habits: I've stopped using a mouse so my desktop has become a rodent-free zone. Instead I'm using a drawing tablet which, rather to my surprise, I've found works perfectly well with ordinary Windows 95 with no need for any pen extensions. Even more to my surprise, after just a few weeks I like it better than a mouse. But this is getting ahead of the story, as my original reason for dropping the mouse was nothing to do with likes and dislikes, but rather with RSI.
                                           
There are, I understand, still people - often employers - who don't believe in RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) and consider it to be a form of high-tech malingering. I can assure such folk that RSI does exist because I've had it, not once but twice, and even a mild episode of short duration is astonishingly painful. RSI is controversial because of its connection to industrial working conditions and practices - when a firm tries to impose computerisation clumsily and without consultation, crying RSI may be a tempting resistance tactic for the staff. But the physical syndrome is real enough, and frighteningly easy to contract.

My first brush with RSI came around five years ago, triggered by an old Lloyd-Loom armchair purchased on Camden Market. This chair was just so comfortable that I innocently decided to adopt it as my writing chair, but after just a couple of days I started to notice a soreness in my left wrist, which by the weekend was so severe that I could barely move the joint. Fortunately I realised was happening - the new chair was around 1.5" lower than my usual one and had altered the angle of my hands on the keyboard. I immediately restored my old chair and abstained from writing for the four days it took the pain to disappear, my wrist immobilised the whole time in a home-made splint of corrugated cardboard. A year or so later I developed a frozen shoulder - a common complaint of the middle-aged whose cause is not well understood, but which in my case succumbed to physiotherapy. I don't know whether that frozen shoulder had anything to do with computers, but its pain prompted me to invest in a fully adjustable office chair and an ergonomic keyboard. Microsoft's Natural Keyboard wasn't yet around, but at that year's CeBIT I encountered a German design called the Marquardt MF2, a spin-off from ergonomics research at the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart - it has a vee-shaped split keypad, twin space bars (one for each thumb) and centrally placed cursor keys, and I still use it.

With these precautions I had no more wrist or arm troubles until around May of this year. The culprit now was the mouse. More and more of my work involves researching on web sites, and that means sitting for hours in front of a browser rather than a word-processor, continually double clicking on links to move onward. I also have this hard-to-prove gut feeling that since I upgraded to Windows 95 I double click a lot more than under 3.1. Around May I started to notice a tenderness in a tendon on the back of my left hand (I'm a southpaw), and it was quite clear that the action of double clicking the mouse button was causing it as I could watch the painful tendon move. The pain gradually grew worse and proved much more difficult to avoid, as my chair and desktop combine to hold my arms and hands at the right angle for typing on the keyboard, but that leaves them at a wrong angle for mouse clicking (in any case your average mouse mat is not adjustable for angle.) I experimented by propping up the mat with wedges, only to discover that my arm muscles really want the mouse to move in a plane angled at about 60 degrees from the horizontal, which is not achievable by any desk known to the furniture trade. In any case conventional ball-operated mice won't work out of the horizontal (though somewhere I have Honeywell's clever but commercially unsuccessful mouse, which employs two bevel wheels instead of a ball and will work even upside down.) 

The end of this saga came, typically, through a series of accidents. At the Windows 97 Show our PC Pro stand was next to Wacom's, and I bought one of their little Artpads at a knock-down show price, intending to use it for drawing. The Artpad needs a serial port, as does the cradle for my USR Pilot, as do my mouse and my modem. I became embroiled in one of those IRQ-sharing nightmares that can make a sane man throw a PC out of the window, and finally in exasperation decided test Wacom's assertion that you can use the Artpad instead of a mouse. To my amazement it proved true. The pen feels much more natural than a mouse for editing text (and of course for drawing) but it works surprisingly well with the Windows interface too. The pen has a rocker button on its side which is programmable, but I use the default setting of a double mouse click when pressed one way, and a right click the other, while just tapping the pen delivers a single click. I've been mildly irritated by a few glitches in the Windows 95 interface - for example descending into a directory tree requires double clicks but coming back out needs single clicks - but it's been worthwhile as the pen-grasping wrist position has completely cured my incipient RSI. The message for technology investors is clear: sell Intel, buy Faber-Castell.