Modern stuff!

Here's a new and interesting 21st century profession : treadmill desk salesman. Such a post could not have existed before this century but our health conscious age keeps finding new ways of doing things. There are companies selling treadmill desks: a treadmill set up at an office desk or an office desk organised to accommodate a treadmill. You have to be careful not to set the treadmill too fast or the person walking while they work ends up running and gets all sweaty. 

I had heard about standing desks, similar to the kind of thing you might expect Bob Cratchit to work at in his Dickensian office, and they seem like a good idea as they prevent the worker from developing the typical computer-used slump, but treadmill desks are a step further along. How possible is it to concentrate on your work if you are having to carry on walking in order to keep your balance? 

Companies who sell such things and monitor their use have found that it is best to place two side by side in a large office complex, rather than one at each end. People are more likely to use one if they have a workmate on another next to them. One machine standing alone seemingly discourages users who are afraid of looking odd, geekish, freakish or just sucking up to management-ish. Oh, the fear of embarrassment! 

These treadmill desk companies also market a "communal bike station", three exercise bikes attached to a table, for people who just like to sit and chat .... and want to exercise at the same time. Now that sounds like a good idea. Exercise bikes are extremely boring! Mind you, surely you can sit and chat to the next spinner to you in a gym! 

I wonder how many companies really are willing to equip their offices with these desks. One companies deluxe model sells at around $2,500 dollars. All right, so that is the deluxe model but I imagine the standard model doesn't exactly come cheap. 

I'm not against exercise and fitness and a healthy lifestyle. Not at all. I am the person who used to cycle to work back in the seventies, who went to a gym before it was a run of the mill kind of thing for people to do, who has always been to yoga classes and aerobics classes. I have always been careful about what I eat, even going through a vegetarian phase, but never really faddy. I have never quite seen the sense of the kind of diet that has you living on coffee and hard boiled eggs. Food should be enjoyable after all. But there are aspects of the 21st century model of the healthy life style that I find a little excessive. 

In the summer when our daughter spent a fortnight with us in Spain, I was amused by the app she had on her iPhone that tracked how far we had walked each day, how many flights of steps we had gone up and down and so on. I was even briefly interested in acquiring such an app myself. But not for long. Now she has gone a stage further. She has an Apple watch which does all the step counting and distance measuring (she tells me how many kilometres she walks round her classroom every day!) and checks her pulse rate if she wants to do that. It will even keep track of how many calories she has consumed and how many she has burnt off doing all those steps and kilometres if she sets it that way. She can use it to check her email, look at messages and make phone calls, Provided her iPhone, to which it must be technologically/telepathically linked, is within range. If she's lucky it might even tell her the time! 

And I find myself wondering what is the point! Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate my iPhone and my iPad and my digital camera. I'm not a luddite, after all! But I have my doubts about the absolute necessity of every new gadget and app that comes along. 

When it comes down to it, they don't stop us procaffeinating - a lovely 21st century word for the tendency to not start anything until you have had a cup of coffee!