In a typical anal retentive need to embellish and customise my workspace, I’ve bought one of those pretentious ergonomic keyboards that are supposed to guard against RSI.

I say “pretentious” not in the sense that it was expensive—because it was shockingly cheap—but that it is in fact pretending to be one of those high-brow type Microsoft natural keyboards, as evidenced by the medals depicted.

I suspect most of this fastidiousness is a result of the rather intense RSI situation I found myself in sometime last year because of excessive gaming, having graduated and not yet started work, I was also suffering mildly from idiot-child-gaming syndrome—which you might see occasionally manifested in children in the form of them spasmodically jerking the controller to make the onscreen character jump—only I was just simply gripping tightly during suspenseful moments of Fable.

Both U.K. and U.S. Patents, so you know they mean biznez.

Perhaps most Singaporeans have iron wrists, but it appears that most shops have stopped bringing in ergonomic keyboards due to a lack of demand. I eventually found my Pretentious One buried deep underneath much cooler, multi-function (as if being ergonomic wasn’t good enough, hm?) keyboards.

I have to say that day one of its use at work has really just sped up my MSN conversations. It didn’t have the groundbreaking writing-inducive effect I was naively hoping for.

And my wrists still hurt.

But my wrist pain could be a transferred pain from the real injury in my right shoulder, which was a result of me trying to be macho and replace the water tumbler atop the cooler in the office. By the time I had gasped and struggled to shove the refill on, I was already regretting saying smugly, “No, we don’t need to call a guy,” to the elderly lady behind me, who then proceeded to commend me on my “strength” while I made mental notes to call said guy in future.

(Afterthought: Hands up anybody who hits the “b” key with the left hand? I find I do so with my right, and so does my editor, so I want to know how many people agree with the ergonomic keyboard’s placing of the “b” on the left side.)

Given my ill-hidden disdain for Macs and the General Cultish Hype that Usually Surrounds Them, it might be slightly ironic that I’ve spent the better part of today surrounded by four of the things—two of which were older Power Mac G3s—that needed files transferred and backed up.

Has anyone noticed the swirly-hologram pattern on the back panel of the G3s? An image search online showed nothing useful with which to illustrate my point, but when you’re going crossed-eyed connecting and re-connecting computers together in a task that’s altogether too difficult for a mind as simple as mine, the last thing you want to see is a repeating-pattern hologram set just a layer beneath the printed labels of which cable goes where, so that your eyes have to struggle to focus on the right thing.

I know the G3 came out at a time where it was radical and groovy and pot-smokey to have a computer that wasn’t grey or black; the hologram was perhaps all the designers could do to stop themselves from just straight out making it tie-dyed.