Fair 48° F

Home > Archive > Mar 27, 2008

A Desk for Volga Boatmen
By Sharon May
Thank businessman Jerry Carr for inventing the ultimate way to get us off our plump butts and onto a piece of exercise equipment.
Carr is an Indiana entrepreneur who jumped on the corporate wellness bandwagon – or at least, the treadmill – to invent an office station that squeezes not only our brains but our bottoms and thighs as well.
Thank you, Jerry. But I'd rather you invented a fat-free, calorie-free chocolate brownie-chunk ice cream that processes through the body like a carton of broccoli. Minus the gas, of course. Or try inventing a whole-body insta-Liposuction booth. Now, THAT would have you sipping mint juleps in the Bahamas, Jerry.
However, the piece of equipment he concocted is a desk that turns into a treadmill, allowing the workaholic to exercise while never leaving the comfort of his or her desk, phone and computer. Carr calls it the TreadDesk. You know, if you add a BreadDesk, a HeadDesk and a BedDesk, the office drone would never have to leave his cubicle. Not until he's slipped into the DeadDesk and buried at age 65. 
Frankly, I think his invention needs a peppier name. "TreadDesk" has me reaching for a babushka and droning the Volga Boat Song. C'mon, let's have some ingenuity here. Give it a little pizzazz. Maybe The Deskinator, the Xer-filesDesk or the BootyDesk.  Or Carr could tie it into a national office weight-loss competition and call it the Biggest LoserDesk.
And speaking of biggest losers, employers, you don't need give your office serfs valuable time off to visit an actual gym. Instead, get their legs pumping while they're pumping out sales contracts, adding up invoices or answering phones. And their breathless tone of voice will leave your customers wondering what kind of bonuses your employees are earning, anyway.
How the TreadDesk works is at the press of a button, the ordinary-appearing desk is hydraulically lifted, and the treadmill goes into calorie-burning action.
According to Carr, at a slow 1.5-miles-per-hour pace, the office worker wouldn't break a sweat or need athletic shoes. Yet, even at that slug-like pace, according to studies by the Mayo Clinic, Carr reports, TreadDesk workaholics could lose somewhere around 100 calories an hour – or 50 pounds a year, ideally.
Yeah, "ideally" is right. Ideally, employee consumption of chocolate-chip-peanut-butter-caramel energy-bars won't rise 350 percent as a reward for their office "workouts." Ideally, employees won't be allowing themselves that 800-calorie bagel with cream cheese because they burned 100 calories during their hour on the pokey treadmill.
Frankly, I see a lot of problems ahead for the TreadDesk.
For example, you might gain some time from your employees in keeping them office-bound for their 30 minutes of workout time. But just think of the time lost to changing out of tight outfits and high heels. And the women will need time to change, too.
Imagine, also, the lawsuits over complaints of twisted ankles and tailbone injuries due to falls from the moving TreadDesks. After all, the same people who can't chew a Tic-Tac and type certainly won't be able to manage walking and keyboarding. I predict lost time from motion sickness as well.
And with all the walking, employee water guzzling will increase tremendously, leading to serial potty breaks (which leads us back to the HeadDesk idea). And workers will take to checking their pedometers as incessantly as their cell phones and comparing numbers with their TreadDeskmates.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I'm betting the treadmill desk will be relegated to the novelty hardware aisle at Sears. I just can't see employers shelling out $1,500 to $4,000 for a TreadDesk when HR departments can just call their employees' pudginess a pre-existing condition and deny healthcare coverage.
And when it comes to workaholics, it seems to me that cell phones and Blackberries are already turning every waking second of their day into an opportunity to get even more work done. Haven't these gizmos already turned vehicles into the CarDesk, restaurants into the DineDesk and grocery stores into the SMartDesk?
As far as I'm concerned, don't turn my desk into a treadmill. I already feel like a caged rat racing in its wheel. Instead, give me an hour off to experience actual sunshine and fresh air.
And while I'm outside walking on real dirt, Mr. Carr, how about getting busy on that digitally programmable full-body insta-Liposuction booth?
You can even call it the LipoDesk.

---