You know what I’m talking about. These damn things. The kind that hang underneath a desk like Satan’s own thigh scrapers.
You know the only thing these things are good at doing? Injuring people’s upper thighs. I’m sure there’s some obscure website for upper thigh injury fetishists that cackles with glee at the widespread success of their invention.
My wife is 5’4. I am 6’4. Both of us hate those damn things and consider them unusable. Now, that’s a pretty wide range of height to find these doohickeys unusable. Furthermore, no one at my wife’s office can use them – they’ve had to take them off the furniture they get, which invariably has them. On the desk we recently bought at home, I just didn’t bother to install it. Stupid-ass piece of shit that it is.
I keep reading all this crap about ergonomic design of office furniture which clearly implies many thousands of hours of study of how people work at a desk with a computer, then I come across these ubiquitious keyboard slides and I realize it’s all just bullshit. There are no studies, just a bunch of design idjits coming up with widgets, and marketing types who use whatever widgets they think will sell, “ergonomics” be damned. None of whom knows anything about spending a long time at a desk with a keyboard.
This being the Dope, I know I will get several responses from people who luuurve these things and couldn’t do without one. So I’m gonna be proactive here. I’m happy for you that your many physical deformities have made these devices usable for you. But that’s no reason to try to inflict them on normal people.
I don’t know how people can use them. I temp a lot and have had to suffer with them. Even adjusted, they’re so low that my back and upper arms cramp up. I ache by the end of the day, just due to where the fucking keyboard is.
Mr. S made me a custom one out of a piece of melamine shelving and two drawer slides. Extra wide to hold my MS Office keyboard AND my mouse. Works great. No cheap plastic for me! Plus I need all the desktop space I can get.
Oh, and I’m 5’7". The drawer brushes the tops of my thighs when I pull it out, but that doesn’t bother me. But when Mr. S builds the new desk when we move my office upstairs, I’m going to ask him to recess the bolts on top so I’m not always smacking my knuckles while mousing.
For the love of God, yes. No desk in the world is high enough for me (and at six feet even, I think I should be able to find one) and you add one of these and it just means I can’t even jam my legs underneath. UGH!! And furthermore, to use it, you have to sit so far back from the monitor you need a telescope to read it.
When our office was remodelled, all the new desks came with those stupid drawers on them. By the end of the second day, everyone had disconnected them.
I hate them, but have been reduced to using one since my Smaller Desk Policy became thwarted by the addition of a scanner. Curses! My mouse is still on the desk itself, so I haven’t totally given in.
When I was The New Guy I looked at my little workspace and did the old, “This stays, this goes…” schtick. The keyboard thing was never there and as my entire experience with computers was as a poor person who couldn’t afford special furniture, I had long ago gotten used to putting the keyboard on the tabletop in front of the monitor. So here I am working away as one of the most productive people in the office with nary a whimper about soreness (alas in *any * part of my body, but that’s a different subject), got my monitor about 4 inches from my nose, keyboard right in front at about chest level and the mouse beside and slightly behind my monitor–I am ONE with the machine. Along comes The Ergonomics Guy and “fixes” everything. Gives me one of those keyboard contraptions with a swing-out mouse platform which is about the same size as my hand (think about why this might be a stupid design).
I’ve worked around the Ergodemon’s designs somewhat: I have the monitor pulled to the edge of my desk, the keyboard krippler is elevated to the max and wedged against the desk top to keep it from bouncing when I type (you forgot to mention that bit Evil) and the mouse is basically unusable without discomfort since I can’t reach it without fully extending my arm (my keboard Krippler has a 3-inch wide palm cushion bringing the “depth” of the kontraption to a length almost exactly equal to my forearm-visualize this and again you will see the problem).
Why won’t these office people just think about the kind of furniture us regular foax have at home and copy *that *? Where’d they get these chairs–I want an ancient comfy chair that hugs me; What demon spawn came up with the krippler–who has one of those at home?
I usually hate those keyboard shelves, but if I’m stuck using a desk that’s too high (or a chair that can’t rise tall enough), I’ll use them to avoid injuring my wrists after several hours.
Around the last ice age I obtained a degree in Industrial Design. I think I can explain to you why this happens.
Unlike the stretch pants used by blonde-haired, red-nailed older ladies down in Florida there is not much else that comes in ‘one size fits all’, because that what’s ergonomics applied to design is all about. Since people wouldn’t be able to afford ‘custom-made desks’, or other thingamaboobies for that matter, designers just take whatever statistics they have available about body size in the US (if that is their market) and (barring any regulations) either choose by the eenie meenie miny mo method, or use the measurements somewhere in the middle, to design a product that will assuredly inconvenience all their customers, except for that one guy who happens to be of average size.
And by the way, chances are the statistics he is using are from around the Pleistocene.
I share your hatred of these thigh bashers from hades. I’m 5’7, not incredibily tall for a women but tall enough, and it doesn’t matter how high or low I adjust my chair, I can never cross my legs with drawing blood while sitting at a desk with one of these things ~ argggggg!
One place I worked didn’t just have a simple keyboard slide on the desks. There was apparently a sale on gigantic hydraulic arms for bulldozers, so someone bought them all, attached keyboard and mouse trays, and bolted them onto the desks. If you were actually so short that your legs wouldn’t become impaled on the mechanism, you would also be craning your neck to see the monitor far overhead. Or, if you extended the monstrosity to its full length and height, you would actually perceive a delay between your keystroke and the cursor moving on the screen. That is, if you could manage to type on a platform attached to a wagging metal dog’s tail.
Most people solved this by keeping the damn thing tucked sideways under the desk and setting up on the main surface. Space was a bit cramped though.
I hate them too. They are everywhere at the hospital. I hate looking thru the Kelly’s catalog and seeing so many different flavors of trays and seeing how fucking expensive they are.
They seem silly in some enviroments, but they are useful in others.
I have used them at work. We would have multiple consoles on multiple levels, each needing it’s own keyboard. In that situation, they came in pretty handy.
Heh. I’m just barely over five feet tall, and I love those suckers. A “normal” desk height is too high for me to type comfortably, but those keyboard drawers are wonderful for me.
I figure that this makes up, a tiny bit, for having to hem every single pair of pants I’ve ever bought since I was 10, even the pants marked “petite”. And it makes up, a little bit, for having to ask complete strangers to get stuff down from the top shelf at stores.
HATE those things. I recently got a new desk at work and was asked where I wanted it mounted. I had to hold back from ranting on the spot and just politely stated that I did not want one. My knees can only take so much punishment.
You know all those people that make up really clever poetic replies to posts. I’ve always wanted to be one of those people, and I was inspired by this line:
You have to sort of sing it and pause at certain times (mainly, before the last syllable of the first stanza) and pretend that it fits really rhythmically, even though it clearly doesn’t.
There’s an idjit
With a widget
You’ll want to pitch it
All the way to Wichita
It’s got its own niche it
takes up where your legs ought to be.
You’ll want to switch it
for something that won’t scrape up your knee.
