Roll over, physioball.
There’s a new piece of fitness-freak office furniture on the cubicle block.
Called the “Zami Smart”, this silhouette-of-a-tombstone looking thing is supposed to improve upon your run of the mill butt rest by… reprimanding you. That’s right. Say sionara to your enabler seat who’s been condoning this egregious posture of yours reminiscent of a masturbatory monkey. The same posture that makes you turn around and spend half your paycheck on massages, heating pads, and motrin. Followed by the downward spiral of painkiller addiction. All ‘cause of the malicious body manipulation your malevolent four legged monster’s been furtively doing all day while claiming to support you. No more. This’s been going on too long.
Zami’s staging an intervention.
The way it works is that you enter your weight and other miscellaneous stats, and then these little sensors at the feet of the thing send it to your device via bluetooth to tell how you shift your weight as an FYI on how shitty you are at doing the most basic, lazy of all human activities: sitting. And then you have to correct it, obviously, or have that hanging over your head along with TPS reports. Whatever those are.
On the one hand, I can see how this would be a good thing. Unlike gadgets in the category of the “anxiety bra”, it’s a little tougher to tap into your psyche-soma junction when you’re doing something like working. You get in the zone, and suddenly, nothing matters but manifesting success outta this sudden bout of motivation you’ve been gifted. And, by the time you’re done, you feel like both your body and soul have run a marathon that culminated in a Friday the 13th death scene.
So, I suppose it could be helpful to have a gentle reminder pre-reaching that fatal finish line.
However, on the other hand, I’m thinking about how this would actually look in application – for me personally – and wondering if it’d just hinder productivity. Especially if you’re in a creative career. I mean, when I get into that aforementioned plug-away mode, I can’t be stopped. And if I am, then getting back into that mode is either a friggin chore or sometimes even impossible. So if it functions via intermittent jarring intermissions from bad-assing to tell you how to sit right, then it might just hold me back. Plus, I’d just be self-conscious about my posture and not focusing on the task at hand for the remainder of my day. Also, I’ve got issues with being issued orders by inferior beings who think they’re better than me. Like hybrid seat-machines. I’d spend my first day in it having a verbal battle the way I do with Siri when I’m trying to find a Starbucks in the midst of a mean green tea latte withdrawal.
Then, ultimately, it’d end up as an artistic tool in my “Curated Rage” gallery (AKA gashes in my walls of objects Hulk launched into them at random over the years). But if you’re not into throwing things (though I highly recommend it for stress relief) and you already bought this chair only to realize it’s useless, fear not. It might have arrived too late to damage-control your god-awful posture; but it still looks like it doubles nicely as an old-lady walker.
Which you’ll be needing soon with that mass of trash upon which you’re perching your pooper all day.
Anyway, till they find something better’n this, I’mma stick with the shape-shifting sacral cradle god gave me:
