When we moved into the new office a few months ago, Atlassian handed out adjustable standing desks to people who wanted them. Numbers were limited, but they were given out in order of tenure and, well, sticking with the same employer for nine years has its privileges.
I'm totally unqualified to comment on the medical benefits of standing desks. My light reading on the subject suggests that sitting down all day is bad for you, but at the same time (and after years of working eight-hour retail shifts I can attest to this) standing up all day isn't all that good either. So you naturally glide (or in the case of an electronically adjustable desk, buzz loudly) between one position and the next based on what your body tells you to do.
So on Monday morning, tired from one of my regular bouts of insomnia and my body still aching from a weekend game of squash, the first thing I did was return my desk to its natural, sitting position. Being the Internet junkie that I am, I celebrated this action with a tweet.
And there it would have ended, but for the Social Media Expert. The Social Media Expert, hired to increase his employer's exposure on The Social Media, decides that the perfect thing to do is butt his product into into my life. Seeing that The Social Media Expert is living in a different timezone, this happens fifteen hours later, after I have raised my desk again, lowered it again, spent the late afternoon lying on an office couch, gone home, worked some more then gone to bed.
Which meant I woke up on Tuesday to this.
I think I should have stuck with my first reaction to some marketer trying to shove his product into my morning stream of pithy tech jokes, Starcraft news, political links and pictures of other peoples food:
Instead, I went with:
Somehow, the Social Media Expert didn't get the hint, and went with the tried and tested Social Media Expert “double-down on being annoying but it's OK because I'm actually apologising!” route.
Actually, I was having a pretty nice Tuesday morning. I'd had a good night's sleep. I woke up next to the most wonderful woman in the world. I was looking forward to a good day in the office. Then some dickhead decided it was a good idea to try to sell me their Awesome Cool Social Media-Hip Brand Identity over Twitter before I'd had my first cup of tea.
So as far as I can tell, “Social Media Director” is a job description that means “Awkwardly interject yourself into other peoples conversations in order to spruik your product.”
On the bright side, now I know that when I get around to buying a standing desk for home, I can cross at least one brand off my list before I even start looking.