By the time I reached her, she had quit her $10,000-a-year job to go into business with her husband. For more than an hour she poured out her anger against the terminals and the company that now used them.
“They affected my stomach quite a bit,” Joan said. “Most days I worked, I would throw up in the ladies room. I didn’t throw up before I started working on the computer, and I haven’t thrown up since I quit.
“The screens weren’t at all soft on the eyes, even with the glare screens that snapped over the top. And they were nontiltable.”
She also complained that the screens were too low even for a five footer like her.
“Could I have some books and put my system on top of them so the screen will be in the middle of my eyes?” she recalls asking a supervisor. “You get this constant tension in your back because you’re always hunched over.”
“No,” she says the supervisor told her in effect, “that’s unacceptable, totally.”
Why?
“Because,” came the reply, allegedly, “the office won’t look the same. It won’t be level.”
Joan says management wouldn’t even let her work with the terminal in the middle of her desk. “They wanted them all on the same side,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I don’t work on that side of the desk, sport.’ It was ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. Even a simple request like that was too much.”
At least the chair was adjustable “I lowered it so I could get my eyes as close to the middle of the screen as possible,” she says. “I was so low that if I opened the middle drawer on my desk I’d bang myself.”