Stiff Necks | Private Eye | Salt Lake City Weekly

Stiff Necks 

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Most folks these days look to the upsides of working from home, but not me. I'm a Negative Nelly when it comes to that.

I'm not so fond of the idea that the modern workplace has evolved into a better and more efficient model for white-collar office workers. Plus, as an egalitarian, I'm conflicted, since I think our outdoor, all-weather, blue-collar workers should be offered the same considerations as their fellows wearing bow ties and sporting carpal tunnel scars.

I thus await the day that truck drivers can guide their rigs through Wyoming with nothing but a home laptop, via a mouse or stylus. They deserve to suffer through soap operas and Food Channel cooking shows no less than the rest of us.

The downside I speak of is a common malady of remote working: A stiff neck. I've not studied it, but it is a tendency among people who no longer commute to the office to complain about their sore necks. And, truth be told, other sore body parts and physical maladies like sore hip joints, aching backs, blurry vision and constant napping also result from remote working—no lurking boss to keep your head swiveling around, thus ever less mobility of that crucial body part.

I believe the reason is that a home worker actually spends more time in front of their computer screen than they formerly did at the office. Not that they accomplish any more work or are more efficient at home, but it's fairly routine to hear that a home worker first looks at a computer screen within minutes of waking, visits it constantly during the day—and checks messages via phone even when away from a workspace—then scorches one more dose of blue light into their eyeballs just before knocking off for the night some sixteen hours after their first morning yawn.

In the old office day job, employees would work five hours and get paid for eight, after factoring in all the coffee breaks, long lunches and smoke or vape breaks. Now they are "working" for 18 hours and being paid for eight, their work never leaving their sides. They even work while on the golf course at noon, thanks to their phones, which they could never do from the downtown office.

Such is progress. The result of which—not having a cushy office chair or desk, poor posture due to kitchen tables not being adjustable for height and the nutty tendency to lie back while "working" from a phone or to dip the head forward unnaturally while at said golf course—all tend to result in a craned neck. It's the modern-day equivalent of black lung. It just comes with the job.

Until the end of June or so, I was like the rest of those aching body home-workers. Every so often, I'd switch out of a word document or a spreadsheet—my "work"—and duck into a session on Twitter or other social media. I'd faked myself out into believing that being up to the nanosecond informed about all matters worldly would make me a better-informed citizen. Nope, it made me dumber.

Like nearly everyone else—on Twitter especially—I lost track of my original intent of discovering things to laugh and ponder about, and instead found myself endlessly looping into our society's dark holes, tracking the words and messages of our country's most malcontent citizens.

All I was doing was playing in my own echo chamber—the only plus side of which being that I did indeed meet some fantastic people and made a considerable number of new friends. However, I used to find that with a cigarette and an Andrew Jackson. I'd meet someone, share a smoke, buy a drink and make a friend—the upside being that I knew who my friends were, what they looked like. Can't do that on Twitter.

I used my real name on Twitter, but not my face. Why make babies cry, I say. Other, popular Twitter folks who are already recognizable—like the handsome Pat Bagley, for instance—don't hide their faces. Unfortunately, neither do politicians.

And one day, I looked at a photo of the smug Mike Lee and thought, "This guy pisses me off every goddamned day. Why do I let him into my world like this?" It was one of the straws that broke my Twitter back.

In my disconnect from Twitter, I somehow set up a new account. I cautiously went to it today and, like a Capistrano swallow, returned to the Sen. Mike Lee Twitter feed. Hidden in his regular screeds against Democrats, Lee irately posted on Aug. 11 about how unfair the FBI search at Mar-A-Lago was (he called it a "raid") and that he had seven questions for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, stating that Americans deserve answers.

But since that tweet, Lee has said nothing about the sensitive documents allegedly found at MAL or the threatening nature of missives from the former president. Nor has Lee given any indication he actually was going to ask the six remaining questions of Garland that we all deserve answers to.

Instead, he's been busy tweeting notions that everything remains worse in America and that he's somehow helping all Utahns by tweeting about inflation (which is dropping, Mike. Gonna tweet that?), taking photo ops with anyone wearing the blue jeans he never doffs, or crapping on college graduates who might apply for less than one-tenth of the loan forgiveness he got for free when he dumped his Alpine home not long after first taking office.

Nothing about Trump, though. You'd think he'd be more loyal to the guy who gave him neck rubs. But no, not Mike Lee. And that's it for Twitter. Nothing happens there except in the moment.

It's just there to rile people up and to keep us off point. And to give them sore necks.

Send comments to john@cityweekly.net.

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About The Author

John Saltas

John Saltas

Bio:
John Saltas, Utah native and journalism/mass communication graduate from the University of Utah, founded City Weekly as a small newsletter in 1984. He served as the newspaper's first editor and publisher and now, as founder and executive editor, he contributes a column under the banner of Private Eye, (the original... more

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