The Hal Syndrome
Raquel Welch, the movie star who pranced around in a fur bikini in a caveman epic, reportedly planned to use a $10,000 computer to write a fitness book. Her ballyhoo in late 1982 stressed that “the mind and body are connected.” But for Time readers she may not have set the best example. A color photo showed a tightly gowned Welch lazing on the floor near the newly famous computer—it lacked a detachable keyboard.
And if you can’t separate your keyboard from the main part of your machine? That might be bad news for both your mind and body. The best distance between your eyes and the TV-like screen may clash with the right separation between your torso and the keyboard. Your posture may suffer. In fairness to Raquel—who declined an interview on the topic—she might have felt perfectly comfortable using her computer. Perhaps she had the proper eye-sight, the perfect body, for it. If she didn’t, however, Raquel may have subjected herself to the Hal Syndrome—letting the computer bully her.
Hal, you’ll recall, killed all but one of his human masters. Raquel’s computer didn’t murder her, but if she indeed toiled hard on it for her book, it may have done a very nice job of killing her back.
The Hal Syndrome can manifest itself in other ways. Even the wrong furniture, indeed especially the wrong furniture, can poison relations between humans and machines.
What’s more, bad ergonomics—the jargon for the human-machine link—actually can make you sick.
Raquel may like her work; but millions of clerical people don’t, and aches from computers can add to their stress. They can help bring about heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, perhaps even raise yours by raising your company’s health-insurance costs over the long run.
And they can lower your profits in other ways.
Working with bad furniture and lighting, computer operators in one study made more errors and tapped out 25 percent fewer keystrokes than they did under better conditions. Michael Smith, former chief of the Motivation and Stress Research Section at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says the NIOSH experiment lasted a week and was closely controlled. A private ergonomics consultant found a 10-15 percent difference in a study of good and bad furniture. Whatever the percentage, however, ergonomics isn’t just a gimmick to sell new tables and chairs; Smith says it especially can help narrow the gap between mediocre and prize workers.