After only a couple of days at my new day job I knew that if I didn’t do something urgently I was going to be crippled. My right hand, my mouse hand, was so full of aches and pains that it was disturbing my sleep at night. I tried to shrug it off, I did some yoga and other assorted stretching exercises (itself now a dubious practice); I tried all the hints and tips in the hewlett-packard guide to safe computing (straight back, feet on the floor, head level with monitor, changing position every ten minutes), and yet still the RSI in my right hand was getting worse.
Clearly something had to be done, but what? Losing my right hand would be awful, imagine being a singer and losing your hearing or a food critic and losing your tongue.
It was at this point I recalled the comments of a girl who, when I was fifteen, maliciously informed me that one of my biceps was bigger than the other. I laughed it off - she was a deeply jaded young hag - but immediately started experimenting with using my left hand.
I had never used my mouse left-handed, though. Like playing the guitar and writing, surely the mouse requires the kind of fluidity you can only get from natural predisposition.
Well, at first, it feels unnatural, there is a lack of sensitivity in your hand/eye coordination, but soon enough it becomes functional. Unfamiliar actions, like highlighting text and then pressing Ctrl-c are clumsy and awkward at first, but soon become if not second then third or fourth nature.
The only worry is that all I’ll succeed in doing is ruining my left hand as well. I can see myself wearing a stick attached to my forehead, desolately prodding the keys like those Romanian orphans who banged their head against the bars of their cot for stimulation.
Still, at least my index finger doesn’t ache any more.
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