On the day the office switched to standing desks, three people quit, one cried, and Gerald discovered he had been sitting wrong for twenty years. The memo from facilities had arrived on a Friday afternoon, which is when all bad news arrives, tucked between a reminder about the holiday party and an update to the parking policy that nobody would read.
"Effective Monday," it read, "all workstations will be converted to height-adjustable standing desks in accordance with our new Wellness Initiative." The Wellness Initiative had been announced the previous quarter by someone in leadership who had recently completed a documentary about longevity and would not stop talking about it.
Monday arrived. The desks were beautiful. Sleek, motorized, with digital displays showing your exact height in centimeters. They could rise smoothly to standing position at the touch of a button. They could also descend, but the memo strongly implied that descending was for the weak. A poster in the break room showed a stick figure standing at a desk with the caption "YOUR BODY WAS MADE TO MOVE." The stick figure looked aggressively cheerful.
By 10 AM the floor resembled a medical experiment. People stood at various heights, shifting weight from one foot to the other like penguins on an ice floe. Some had removed their shoes. One person was standing on a yoga mat. Gerald, who sat in the corner by the printer, had raised his desk to maximum height and was now typing at chin level because he had not realized you were supposed to adjust it to your own proportions.
The first casualty was Janet from accounting. Janet had stood for exactly forty-seven minutes before her left knee made a sound like someone stepping on a bag of chips. She sat down on the floor, which defeated the purpose of the standing desk but was technically still not sitting in a chair, so she felt she was complying with the spirit of the initiative.
By Wednesday, an underground economy had formed. People were trading anti-fatigue mats like currency. Someone in marketing had smuggled in a bar stool and was hiding it under a jacket whenever management walked by. The IT department had collectively lowered their desks back to sitting height and dared anyone to say something about it. Nobody did. You do not antagonize the people who control your password resets.
Gerald, meanwhile, had made a discovery. After twenty years of sitting in an office chair with the posture of a question mark, standing upright had revealed that he was two inches taller than his driver's license claimed. He stood at his desk with the quiet pride of a man who had found free height. He would not be sitting down again.
The Wellness Initiative was quietly discontinued six weeks later. The official reason was "evolving workplace needs." The actual reason was that the CEO had visited the floor, stood at a desk for eight minutes, and declared the whole thing "barbaric." The motorized desks remained, frozen at various heights like tombstones marking the spot where good intentions went to die.
Gerald kept his desk at standing height. He was the only one. He stood there every day, typing steadily, two inches taller than the world believed him to be. When people asked him why he still stood, he shrugged. "I spent twenty years not knowing how tall I was," he said. "I am not sitting down now."