Background:

Vendors at stadium events often wander around the stands, selling hot dogs / popcorn / etc. to sports fans. Since a cart is impractical due to the stairs, vendors typically carry their products using a special-purpose carrying harness.

The Issue:

For many office jobs, a person needs access to a keyboard in order to accomplish work. This often means that 1) the person tends to stay sitting all day (bad) and 2) the person can’t get any work done while walking to/from meetings / walking to/from their car, etc.

Proposal:

The solution to sedentary office work is simple: just buy a stadium vendor hot-dog-seller harness/table thing, and put a keyboard on it (Figure 1)! (The monitor could be supplied as a VR headset, not shown here.)

Conclusion:

This is superior to the standing desk, which partially solves the “sitting all day” issue without addressing the “can’t do any work while walking” issue. (It is important that every theoretically-possible productive instant of time is extracted from the employee before their withered husk is discarded.)

Keep an eye out for this new desk setup at various forward-looking workplaces (https://www.google.com/search?q=workplaces+that+intrusively+track+workers) in the near future!

PROS: Brings the dream of endless toil at all times one step closer to reality.

CONS: Attempting to multitask to this degree may result in people running into things / falling down stairs / getting run over by a car / etc. Unclear if the overall productivity tradeoff will be positive.

Originally published 2025-03-31.