Odd O'blography

The Left Hand of Mouseness

My commercial aviation career took a zig in 1995, when I transferred from facilities factory support to customer support as a maintenance manual author. As a Facilities Engineer, I prepared purchase specifications and wrote project status reports. I'd become comfortable with Word for Windows and I loved its WYSIWYG display (what you see is what you get). Seeing different fonts on the screen was a novel experience for someone who'd cut their word processing teeth on the original Wordstar program for CP/M. The proprietary publishing system used for the maintenance manuals seemed like a giant step backward. The minicomputer that held the actual data was accessed through green-screen terminals that were hopelessly outdated compared to a desktop computer running Windows 95. And the maintenance manual author didn't even use that ancient terminal technology.

Data entry personnel did the actual typing, while I reverted all the way back to colored pencils. As an author, I analyzed engineering drawings, wiring diagrams, and vendor documentation (all paper) and turned them into step-by-step procedures for the airline mechanic. My original hand-written text was entered into the publishing system by a data entry clerk and then printed on fanfold paper, double spaced, for my approval. Editing was done with red pencil for deletions, blue pencil for additions, and green pencil for editorial comments.

You might wonder why we used a proprietary minicomputer, and why the text was formatted as a database rather than a document. The answer is configuration control. Creating an aircraft maintenance manual is a complex process. Each model has its own base manual that fills an entire bookcase. Each airline has its own customized set of manuals, and the current configuration of each airplane in the entire worldwide fleet must be tracked per FAA regulations. Microsoft Word wasn't (still isn't) anywhere close to being able to handle the database-like requirements of tracking airplane configurations.

Thankfully, things changed quickly in those early years of computing technology. By 1997, we all had desktop PCs with terminal emulation programs. We could enter our own data and display the simulated manual pages on-screen instead of wasting reams of paper. The downside was the wear and tear of spending hours hammering away at the keyboard.

Ergonomics was just a funny sounding word in those days. Few of us really believed in carpal tunnel syndrome, it was something that shirkers used as an excuse to get out of work. No one understood the effects of an awkwardly laid out workstation. I had a keyboard and a state of the art 19" CRT on my desk. No keyboard tray, no ergonomic chair, just an upward reach to a mouse that kept my wrist bent at a near 90-degree angle.

It took several years, but eventually I developed enough pain in my wrist that work became almost intolerable. Even then, I never saw a doctor. That would've been a show of weakness. Instead, I learned to mouse left-handed. That allowed me to solve the problem on my own. It worked out better than might be expected. I quickly gained left hand dexterity and mousing felt normal again in a couple of weeks. The pain in my right wrist subsided and I finally submitted to an ergonomic evaluation of my workstation. A better layout helped preserve my left wrist, and it remains pain-free. The damage to my right wrist, however, is permanent. I can mouse equally well with either hand, but the pain returns in a few days if I use my right hand. So, I know what I'm going to do with the time I have left.