Coffee heat rising

How to Choose the Perfect Office Chair

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This is a guest post by my friend Kenneth F. Muhich, D.C., of the Stetson Chiropractic Clinic

Is any one office chair perfect for everyone? Experts in ergonomics will tell you “no.”  The perfect office chair for you depends on many factors, such as your height, weight, posture, areas of pain, and what your chair will be used for.  How many hours per day will you be in it? And does your work entail computer, phone, or paper work?  As you can see there are many variables.

As a doctor of chiropractic my main concern is the patient’s posture.  Recent research has shown a direct relationship between many health problems and a forward neck posture.  With more and more people spending more and more time on computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices, health problems are beginning to pop up.  Some of these health conditions include disc herniations, loss of concentration, reduced immune function, and cardiovascular, respiratory and gastrointestinal problems.

Human bodies were not designed to sit in chairs for hours at a time, yet this is what our modern age has brought us five to seven days a week for six or eight or more hours per day.  Welcome to the wonderful world of health problems and premature aging.

So, since you’re spending most of your waking hours sitting in front of a desk, it’s in your interest to find the best office chair for your body. An ergonomic chair gives you the most adjustable options for your body. But these chairs have so many options to select! If you are looking for the best office chair for yourself, what are the guidelines you should use?

What is Ergonomic?

The term “ergonomics” comes from two Greek words: ergo, meaning work and nomos, meaning natural laws. Ergonomics works with your body’s makeup so the chair fits your body’s posture.

A correct office chair for you should be adjustable in many  ways to fit your body.

• The chair should rotate 360 degrees.
• The depth of the seat should be adjustable.
• The chair height should be adjustable.
• The chair seat should tilt front and back.
• An adjustment to tighten or loosen chair seat tension should be available.
• The chair’s back should tilt front and back.
• Arm height should be adjustable up and down.
• The distance between the arms should be adjustable in and out.
• The arm pivot front and back should be adjustable.
• A lumbar air pump should be available.

Some specialists in ergonomics frown on chairs with arm rests, because they may make it hard for you to get close enough to the computer. This is another matter that depends on the user’s size, body characteristics, and preferences. Each workstation problem can be solved by working with a specialist in ergonomics.

Putting Your New Chair to Work

Once you have chosen your chair and it feels great, you must integrate it into your workstation.  Although many believe that the chair you’ve chosen is the most important device in your workstation, there are other factors to consider.

The overall workstation, including chair, desk, computer, and desktop tools, can be the most modern and up-to-date in the industry, but if you abuse it, you will have health problems. With your ergonomic chair, some of these problems are easy to solve.  For example, when you sit at your workstation your computer should be in front of you.  The top of the screen should be no further than 24 inches from view, controllable by chair positioning.  Don’t forget to use a glar- reducing screen, which helps with eye strain.  Arms and hands on your board should be relaxed and just below the level of your heart. Knees should be either level with or slightly higher than your hips.  All of these can be made correct with your new ergonomic chair.

The height of your work surface should be between 24 and 32 inches. This is a variable based upon the individual’s height. Raise or lower chair or work surface to find the most comfortable position.

Now Get Up!

You have your chair and work surface perfect, right?  Now consider one other thing.

Sitting at your workstation for hours without moving causes stasis, which for individuals may mean vascular problems, muscle tightness, headaches, fatigue, and numbing of the work brain. The solution is to get a kitchen timer or something similar and set it for 30 or 45 minutes. When the alarm goes off, simply get up, walk around your workstation, and take a few deep breaths. This will do wonders for you and your job.

A proper office chair can mean the difference between a comfortable place to work that is safe, healthy, and productive or drudgery blighted with repetitive strain injuries and postural health problems.

Go find yourself an ergonomic chair and enjoy your job and a healthy life.

Images:
Aeron Chair. Public domain.
Computer Workstation Variables. Integrated Safety Management,
Berkeley Lab. Public Domain.

Cool new blog metrics tool

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Have you seen what Andrew at Money Crashers has gotten up to? He’s created an elaborate tool for ranking personal finance blogs. He runs nine metrics through an algorithm to calculate what he believes to be an accurate rank for each of 368 sites.

How does it compare with Wisebread’s Top 100 personal finance blogs? Well, I’m not techie enough to deliver an informed opinion, but that won’t stop me from holding forth anyway. Wisebread, from what I understand, shows site rankings by seven metrics, but bases its rankings on Alexa. By clicking on the appropriate link, you can also view listings by Technorati rank, subscribers, link authority, and compete scores.

Money Crashers’ ranking apparently combines nine metrics to come up with an amalgamated ranking taking all of them into consideration. You can view the ranking by any single metric by clicking on its icon at the top of the columns (at least, I think that’s what it’s doing…but i are a english major, i are not a i.t. guru).

Some of the likely suspects appear at the top of each ranking: Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar, for example, rank among the top five in both tools. Some are radically different; Yakezie, for example, appears as number 8 in Wisebread’s and number 300 in Money Crashers’ listing.

At the moment, Funny ranks 76th at Wisebread and 182nd at Money Crashers. If I’m understanding correctly that one of them ranks solely on the basis of Alexa and the other works a bunch of sources into its ranking, then I’m inclined to suspect that Money Crashers’ figure is probably closer to reality. Alexa measures only visits to your site by people whose browsers have the Alexa toolbar. Until Financial Samurai had the idea of recruiting PF bloggers to use it by way of jacking up their Wisebread rankings, most Alexa subscribers were webmasterish sorts. The Alexa ranking, IMHO, is severely limited by the number and interests of the folks who download and activate the toolbar.

Kinda fun to contemplate the stats, though, isn’t it? And don’t you love that little piggybank in the MoneyCrasher’s badge, over there in the right sidebar??

A brief lull, and an odd discovery

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Finally done with all the English 101 stuff, the grades finally entered in the District’s system. Let’s hope nothing there comes back to bite. That’s a forlorn hope, of course: as anyone who teaches anything knows, someone has to make an exception of himself. Every. single. time. So let’s rephrase that: let’s hope that whatever comes back to bite isn’t a pit bull. 😉

We now have three days until class starts again, this time not one but two eight-week gigs: the magazine-writing course and another English 101 crew. People are already turning in stuff for the magazine course, it having gone online a few days early, for their convenience. Oh well.

Having been sick for the past two and a half weeks with some sort of indigestion and heartburn paired with an unending headache, I’ve been madly self-medicating. Started with my usual subtractive medicine: stop ingesting things I love that I know are probably bad for me. Getting rid of the coffee helped some—alas. One of the small things that makes life worth living, or at least tolerable, is starting the day with a delicious cup of top-quality French-press coffee. But it must be admitted that the stuff keeps me awake at night, contributes hugely to the tooth-clenching, and does annoying things to the gut.

Then it was off the sauce—damn it. The other small thing that makes life worth living is celebrating the end of the work day with a beer or a glass of wine. But we suspect that daily tippling is not good for our health, or at least not good for our moral standing. After I snuck back into the grocery store two days ago to purchase a Murphy’s stout to go with dinner, the instantaneous and unmistakable protest from the belly showed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there will be no more swizzling for the likes of me!

I’d been using a generic version of Pepcid AC, which was laying around the house because the vet recommended it for the dog, who occasionally would barf in the weeks after I got her. This stuff did so little that it soon became apparent it was doing nothing. So yesterday when I was at the Safeway I picked up a package of omeprazole, the stuff that’s in Prilosec. The pharmacist said it had virtually no side effects.

Right.

These days I don’t take anyone’s word for that, so looked up a non-woo-woo study to check the side effects and their incidence rates.

HOLY God! Headache? Chest pain? Severe diarrhea? Severe stomach pain? Pancreatitis (some fatal)? Esophogeal candidiasis? Liver failure (some fatal)? Liver necrosis (some fatal)? And on and on…

Like I’m not sick enough?

So we’ll be returning that stuff to the store.

Moving on, I turned to the woo-woo pages, where I learned that a tisane of sage leaves and hot water has been used for centuries to treat indigestion and heartburn. Supposedly, too, chewing up and swallowing a half-dozen blanched almonds calms your stomach. We’re also told that raw apple is imagined to be soothing.

Well, what the heck. I happen to have a sage plant growing in the back yard, almonds in the freezer, and a lifetime supply of apples in the fridge. None of these things is known to cause necrosis of the liver.

So I picked some sage leaves, made a tea of them, and then blanched some almonds. Surprisingly, munching the almonds seemed kind of calming. Probably all in my head, though.

The sage tea, however, actually did seem to work to good effect. Can’t say it cured anything, but after drinking it, I did feel quite a bit better.

This morning, having awakened queasy again, munched some more almonds, brewed some more backyard sage tea, and took the dog for a walk. When we returned, I ate some of the rice I’d fixed for the dog’s cuisine, and afterward felt OK.

So, who knows? Maybe the stuff helps. Or maybe the passage of time helps (three weeks seems like a lot of passaging…but when you get old, your body heals very, very slowly). Experience suggests that these little ailments will do one of two things: kill you or go away on their own. Not much exists in between.

Old age. 😀 It’s not for the young or the faint of heart.

Right now a gigantic pot full of chicken carcasses and the bone from a chuck roast (found yesterday for $1.69/pound!! and converted to hamburger) is simmering with onion and herbs to make a glorious stock for future soups, which we hope also will be duly therapeutic. So good…

How to Make Leftovers Stock

You can make this in a slow cooker, but for some reason I think the stuff tastes better when it’s made in a pot on the stove.

Save a bunch of bones from chicken, beef, lamb, and pork—toss them in the freezer till you’re ready to use them.

When ready to spend the better part of a day keeping an eye on a slowly simmering brew, break out a large stock pot. Skim the bottom of the pot with olive oil. You’ll want to start this process in the morning, BTW.

Then coarsely cut up a fresh onion—no need to peel it—and brown it gently in olive oil. Add some cut-up celery and carrot. Toss in a couple of garlic cloves. Add herbs to your taste—I used some dried fines herbes and (what else?) the sage leaves wilted when I made the sage tea. Anything will do nicely.

When the onions have lightly browned or fully caramelized, depending on your mood and how closely you were watching the pan, add your collection of bones. Cover the whole mess with water.

Turn the heat to medium high. This is the only time you’ll need to hang around the kitchen. Keep an eye on the pot, and when it just comes to a boil, turn it down to low. Cover and go away.

Allow the broth to simmer for hours. Many hours.

When you get around to it, much later in the day, turn off the heat and heave the pot over to the drainboard next to the sink. Set a large bowl in the sink and place a strainer over it. Ladle the broth and cooked stuff into the strainer, draining the juices into the bowl. Use the back of the ladle to press as much of the broth out of the bones & veggies as you can. Discard the used-up bones and veggies.

You now have a stock that you can use for any number of delicious things, either to cook with or simply to eat as a light soup. You can add stuff to it to make a sturdier soup—pasta, rice, veggies, barley, whatever. A little white wine or sherry gives it a very nice flavor.

This is not real stock, which has to be clarified and reduced. But it’s sure good enough for government work!

Image: Blue Lotus. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

The Divide by 4 Percent Rule?

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Frugal Scholar has been ruminating about an idea inspired by something Jacob of Early Retirement Extreme wrote to the effect that you can get a rough preview of how much you need to retire by dividing the annual cost of an item (or, by extension, a set of items) by 4 percent.

Jacob’s theory is that you can calculate the amount you’ll need to cover the cost of, say, your daily coffee habit by figuring the annual cost and multiplying by .04, the “canonical” 4 percent withdrawal rate. His idea is that you will figure out how much savings you’ll need to support each of your various expenses in retirement, and, because these will be smaller than the daunting total, you’ll feel a) more motivated to work toward each smaller goal and b) less inclined to diddle away money on unnecessary purchases. In his example, if you spend $50 a month on groceries, you’ll need $15,000 in savings ($50 x 12 ÷ .04) to sustain your eating habit through retirement. A more realistic $300 a month would require a stash of $90,000.

Holy mackerel! What fodder for the neurotic frugalist!

So naturally I had to whip out the calculator. Do I have enough to sustain me through the end of my life at a 4 percent drawdown?

We know expenses are, at most, $2,045 a month. This is the amount I budget, even though the truth is expenses go that high only during the pricey summer months, when utility bills hover near the stratosphere.

$2045 x 12 – $24,540
$24,450 ÷ .04 = $613,500

So the answer is hell, no, I most certainly do not have enough to sustain me through old age. When last seen, total cash holdings came to about $488,000. I’m doomed!

Or am I?

My actual maximum monthly out-of-pocket costs are not $2,045, because they’re defrayed by net income from Social Security. In reality, the amount I have to come up with to support myself in my present penurious splendor is “only” $1,070, or $12,840 a year.

$12,840 ÷ .04 = $321,000

In that light, retirement looks a lot more doable, even on my pretty modest savings.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t take into account the effect of inflation, at least not in any realistic way. To manage that $12,840 from a 4 percent drawdown without draining my savings over a 25- or 30-year period, I will have to keep most of my money fully invested in stocks and bonds. No CDs for this little chick! A CD doesn’t earn enough to allow a 4 percent drawdown—at that rate your savings would disappear pretty quickly. And CD rates do not track inflation effectively, mostly because they’re so low they don’t generate enough income to keep grand-baby in shoes.

And as we know, the market is highly unreliable. Lose $180,000, as I did in the late, great crash of the Bush economy, and your income drops dramatically. In that event, if you’re drawing down 4 percent, you’ll have no chance of building your nest egg back up to a point where it will support you. If today I lost $180,000 again, a 4 percent return on the remainder would be $12,320, less than I need to survive even with Social Security.

One thing is as certain as death and taxes: the market will go down again. Whatever goes up must come down; the market follows that fundamental rule of physics, if in a metaphorical way. And it’s safe to assume that inflation will return. It could return with a vengeance, given the overall sickness of the world’s economy.

What this means is that, unless you’re very wealthy, you’re left with only one course of action: keep working until you drop.

Right now I’m not pulling down any retirement fund money, because I’m scraping together enough by part-time teaching to cover my costs. I intend to keep teaching as long as I can dodder into the classroom, which I figure will be about another five years. After the age of 70, I probably won’t be able to do it any more. Then I’ll be forced to use savings to live on.

Well. I don’t feel too worried about my own future.

But I sure do worry about my son’s. Given that most Americans now earn low rates of pay and can expect, with competition from Third-World countries stealing jobs as fast as water can drizzle out of a half-open tap, to see pay continue to fall, and given that the Republicans have come as close as they dare to saying aloud that they intend to get rid of Social Security, what are our kids going to do in old age?

I fear most of our sons and daughters will not be able to look forward even to semiretirement: that they will have to plan on working—full-time, not at some part-time gig—until they are too infirm to work at all. Experience tells us that no matter how much you love your job (and most jobs available today are anything but lovable), after 15 or 20 years, you’re royally sick of it. After 20 or 30 years, you need to retire, for your health and your sanity’s sake. Without Social Security, that will not be possible for most Americans.

A pothole in the road to voc-ed

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I see the volcanic Stanley Fish is rumbling over the dim fate of the humanities. He sees SUNY Albany’s dismantling of its French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater programs as the beginning of the end.

It’s not news, of course. Foreign language departments across the land have been eviscerated or killed: at Drake and Louisiana State (which also terminated all of its English instructors), with a death warrant in the works at the University of Maine. Arizona State, my beloved former employer, eliminated the foreign language requirement for the bachelor’s degree years ago, and bumbling semiliteracy in a second language is no longer required for many graduate programs. In any event, ASU will accept American Sign Language to fill what few requirements remain.

And what do we expect? When everything but business and engineering is devalued and we convert education to an assembly line, what are the humanities other than a pothole in the road to voc-ed?

So it goes. Elite schools no doubt will continue to educate the elite, an exercise that involves furnishing the mind, not just inculcating skills. But as for true public education? Expect your tax dollars to support institutions modeled on proprietary schools, whose mission is to churn out lots and lots of worker bees, future technicians and paper-shufflers with bachelor’s degrees that give them no clue to what the world is about or how it got to be that way.

And if a kid in the middle or working classes has a hunger for insight, a mind for deep thinking, or a taste for art?

Oh well.

Is Money Talk Rude?

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Over at Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman brings up an interesting topic: the old tradition that you don’t talk about money. Spinning off an article that appeared on CBS MoneyWatch.com in which an informant told a reporter that “talking about money is really crass,” especially during a recession, Donna suggests that there’s a limit—a fairly tight one—on how much you should say about what. In particular, she objects to sharing details about one’s salary and one’s net worth. The Surviving & Thriving piece generated a lot of lively discussion, including a comment from a behavioral scientist at an outfit that coaches people on requesting a raise.

Like Donna, I grew up in a time when you did not talk about money matters. It just wasn’t done, as my mother would say. Personally, I find the whole subject of money fascinating, and so I talk about it freely. If that’s crass, it explains why people don’t like me. What’s iconoclastic when you’re young and pretty is something else when you’re old and fat. 😉

The first time I really shocked someone by frankly revealing what I earned came when I was working at Arizona Highways, at the time the largest regional magazine in the country. I was earning about $24,000, the highest salary I’d ever made. Because Highways was a state publication—we were part of the Department of Transportation—my salary was a matter of public record. Anyone could (and to this day can) look it up.

One of my job responsibilities was to trot around town giving little dog-and-pony shows to plug the magazine. I was asked to go to a low-income middle school for “Career Day,” a much-ballyhooed event in the public school district.

Grinding poverty is a real phenomenon here in Arizona. Because it’s a right-to-work-(for-nothing) state, salaries in general are surprisingly low, and when you’re poor, you’re very poor indeed. Low-income districts include the children of migrant workers, who earn minimum wage or less and who often are stiffed for their pay in one way or another. In a state whose schools overall rank near the bottom nationwide, education in ghetto schools is a heart-rending joke. A friend who worked in a low-income high school for several years told me his kids did not know where the Pacific Ocean was or even what an ocean was, that they could barely read, could not do basic math, could not make change, did not know enough to make their way through the modern world.

When I walked across the campus, I noticed only one white face among the teeming students, and that (I was later told) belonged to the son of a teacher. Most of the teachers looked as worn-out as the school buildings, which were old and shabby. As I spoke to the class, the teacher, an older, tired-looking man, translated my words into Spanish.

During the Q&A period, one girl asked me how much I earned. Without a pause, I told her.

After the class ended, the teacher took me aside. He actually was angry.

“You shouldn’t have told her how much you earn,” he said.

“Why not?” said I. “It’s public record. And it doesn’t do me any harm to let her know what a magazine editor earns.”

“She has no way of understanding what that $24,000 means.”

Well, thought I without saying it, You’re her teacher. Maybe you should teach her how many pairs of Adidas $24,000 will buy.

In retrospect, I think he was more offended by the question and the frank answer than by the darkness in which his students lived.

Over at WalletPop, SmartMoney.com reporter Kelli Grant lists five money faux pas, some of which are bound to ring everyone’s bell. Right at the top is asking people what they earn.

Now I will allow that it’s rude to bluntly ask someone about their income. On the other hand, I feel no great compunction about voluntarily sharing such information. There are some situations in which it’s useful to know what coworkers earn or what people in your part of the country earn for the job you do. Certainly, family members, including older children, should know and understand what you earn, so they can make reasonable decisions of their own.

My former husband never told me how much he earned. I knew in round figures, and of course I could have figured it out from our income tax statements if I could have grasped the complexities of a corporate lawyer’s income tax statement. But that was beyond my  ken. He just handed me a credit card and a checkbook and that was that. I spent freely, because I had no idea how much we had but assumed a corporate lawyer must be earning plenty. We were in debt up to our teeth, partly because I charged anything I pleased whenever I pleased.

It doesn’t do to be overly private with your spouse about money matters. A marriage is supposed to be a partnership, and in practical terms that means a financial partnership.

Nor, I think, does it serve our interests to be overly private with our coworkers. The only way we can know what we should be earning is to know what people in our company and in our trade or profession are earning. One of the reasons this state does have such grinding poverty is that people don’t fully recognize how poorly they’re paid relative to their peers in other states, and even relative to their peers in other companies. If no one will discuss what they earn, it’s impossible to know how well your own salary stacks up against a fair rate of pay.

To my mind, what’s rude is conspicuous consumption. Living in a McMansion is rude. Bragging about your vast wealth is rude. Carrying a purse emblazoned all over with some expensive designer’s logo is rude. Looking down your nose at people whose clothing cost less than the Armani you’re wearing is rude.

This is more a matter of behavior than of talk. The classiest millionaires are the ones who look, talk, and behave like you and me.