Progress? 

Today a friend stopped by the house after her yoga class. She told me how yoga had solved her bulging neck disk that was caused by too much driving and hovering over a key board. She credited yoga with her ability to open up her shoulders and solve her own ailments. I told her the story of the massage therapist who told me I needed to work on opening up my shoulders because of too much keyboard time also. I asked him how my shoulders were for a seventy year old. “Oh, great,” he told me. “Good, since I am only fifty.” (I wa just trying to find out how bad I really was.)
After that conversation today I got to thinking about all the secretaries that worked at Avon, where my Dad worked when I was a kid. They were beautiful women who sat at their typewriters all day, except for the times they were going to the Xerox room or to get coffee.  
My Dad was a prolific writer, scribbling out page after page of his left handed scrawl across many yellow legal pads. Goldie, his secretary, had hours of typing daily just from the things he wrote on the three hours he spent on the train going to and from work. Then there was all the typing that she had to do from what he dictated, not just in person, but also on his dictaphone.  
I knew Goldie for years and never once did I ever her her complain about neck or shoulders pain despite the many hours spent at her IBM Selcetric. I also never ever saw Goldie hunch over her typewriter. She sat at her desk with the most perfect of posture.
I took typing back in junior high school. My teacher Mrs. Green and her army of typewriters were housed in a portable classroom out back of the gym. It was perfect because that kept the noise of us all banging away on the keys sequestered from where the real learning was going on inside the building. The first thing Mrs. Green taught us was how to sit at the typewriter and hold our hands in position. At the time it seemed like over kill, especially for someone like me who had terrible posture to begin with. Now I am understanding the importance of all that.
Along the way, with the advent of lap top computers and now IPads, we have detached ourselves from always having to work at a desk and sit in an appropriate chair. I am terribly guilty of writing my blog every night from my bed where I certainly do not have good posture. Those old school ways of sitting up straight with both feet on the floor, shoulders down, neck stretched long have disappeared.  
We have taken the convenience of being able to work anywhere and have ruined our bodies because of it. And now we have to go to trainers, classes and physical therapy to fix the damage we have done because of that convenience. Perhaps I need to look for an old IBM typewriter and a little typing desk and chair and go back to sitting properly when I write. I can just take a photo of the paper with all the cross outs and edits and post that on the blog. I might lose every reader, but at least I won’t be risking a bulging disk.