Ewan Morrison: 'All this mobile insecurity causes heartache and, worse still, muscle pain'

Published on Saturday 9 August 2008 19:56

THE US economy loses £30m a year through work-related injury because of it. Almost 70% of office staff claim to suffer from it. I am a victim, and have promised myself that I will type this with my right hand only so as not to aggravate my condition.

What is it? Excruciating pain in hand and wrist muscles, upper arm and neck. Untreated it can lead to neuralgia, and loss of feeling down an entire side of the body. It is Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) and can attack anyone who uses keyboards, Blackberries, i-Pods, computer games and mobile phones – ie almost everybody.

Writer's cramp is the old name for it, but it has many variations: tennis elbow; Rubik's wrist; gamer's rhumb – from spending hours at a PlayStation; and, amusingly, raver's wrist – from spending hours with hands in the air twirling fluorescent tubes.

Medical names include tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome.

The human hand was never designed to cope with such repeated miniscule movements within a static arm, it takes the articulation of the entire arm to get blood pumping through the fingers. Without this, finger muscles are like machines grinding through gears without oil.

Friends make the same old joke when I moan about it: "Repetitive hand movements, eh? Aye, better stop that, you could go blind too." As I usually use my right hand for recreational purposes, the reason for my dead left arm remained a mystery, until I discovered the latest variable: 'text wrist'. Virgin Mobile reports that 3.8 million people each year are affected.

So, I've decided that this month, I shall reduce my texting to zero. It got me thinking about how we text excessively, and of how we homo-sapiens managed to survive quite well before the invention of the mobile phone and how the damned thing has changed our behaviour, making us think we can't survive without it.

Excessive use – for example, a drink with a mate last week. We'd exchanged four texts deciding on place and time, then I had been running late, so texted to apologise, then texted another four times to give my location and ETA. I'm leaving flat now – Waiting for a taxi – Heading up Byres Road now – B/w U in 2. In the days before texting my friend would have trusted me to turn up and maybe had a fly pint during the wait. But now, two minutes without a text reply seems an affront.

I had a girlfriend in Edinburgh who used to send me 20 texts a day. Hows U? – What you up 2? – Where RU now? At first I found it endearing, but then it seemed a mark of insecurity. If I failed to reply within an hour she assumed I was in the huff, and sent me a barrage of texts apologising for her insecurities. But what RU up to really? xxx. The assumption being that I was cheating on her. So affectionate text-flirting became a form of surveillance. No doubt, when mobile phone GPS technology becomes widely available, lovers will monitor each others' movements street by street.

All this mobile insecurity causes heartache and, worse still, muscle pain. I'm off to put my hand in the fridge and take an Ibuprofen to stop the swelling because I just failed to keep my promise to type with just one hand and I replied to a text with my wrong hand and am now in agony.