The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

since you must crank up the tube to compensate; at $100 or more, they are more expensive than the other add-ons. But they give you a better image than other filters. The contrast especially can be impressive. Noise Reduction Don’t just buy the fastest, the cheapest, printer. Look for one with good manners toward the humans nearby—a _quiet_ printer. A daisy wheel can be a real offender. What more can you expect of a machine with a metal hammer constantly striking away? And dot-matrix printers often make a higher-pitched sound that mercilessly cuts through walls. So ask your printer supplier for noise figures if you think this will be a problem. Military standards say that for work needing heavy concentration—in areas like libraries and conference rooms—the sound level must be no more than 45 decibels on the dB(A) scale, which allows for sensitivity of the ear at various sound pitches. Otherwise, aim for a level less than 65 decibels. You may be able to rent the necessary meter from a scientific instrument store. Measure the sound from the distance someone’s head would be when he was working. Here again, you might ask the supplier for a look-see at an existing installation. Put your printers if necessary inside padded wooden boxes; carpet; drape walls; install sound-muffling panels on ceilings and walls, perhaps. The less echoey and factorylike your office is, the more productive it will be. Air Conditioning, Heat, And Ventilation Around the first week of January 1983, when _Time_ honored the computer as the “Machine of the Year,” a Commerce Department computer ungratefully stopped working and delayed the release of an important government report. The reported cause was nothing more than a dehumidifier motor out of whack; perhaps the room got too moist for the computer sensor. If so, I wasn’t surprised. Computers and related machinery can sometimes be quirky about their surroundings. My old Anderson Jacobson daisywheel printer, later sold, wouldn’t run unless the room temperature was above fifty degrees. Since I was comfortable at seventy degrees, I obliged the AJ. In our attentiveness to machinery, however, let’s not forget the people nearby. “You can see the heat wafting out the backs of our VDTs,” said a woman with the northeastern insurance office—and yet the firm didn’t turn up the air conditioning. “What might happen,” said Waters about a hot insurance office, “is the [overheated computers] may go down and they’ll pay out extra money, anyway.” Look inside a VDT and you’ll very likely find an orange glow in the neck of the tube. The heat there may be no more than a light bulb’s, but on a hot day, with more than one machine in the same room, you’ll want your air conditioning to be up to the job. At the same time, having a room too cool—even in just a few places—can harm productivity. An employee in the insurance office said her coworkers, when not using the terminals, sometimes wore gloves. As for bad ventilation, it, too, can jinx production and add to sick leave, and in recent years, especially, it’s been a problem, as companies tightened up their buildings to save energy. People in high-paced jobs or those requiring concentration may suffer the most. Healthy Honesty When Laura Moore was pregnant, she neither smoked nor drank—not even coffee. She did, however, operate a computer terminal for a telephone company in Renton, Washington, near Seattle, and she was one of three VDT operators there with problem pregnancies within a year and one-half.[44] Footnote 44: The facts of the Renton, Washington case come from Laurie Garrett’s National Public Radio interview with Laura Moore, which aired August 12, 1982. Laura Moore, after nineteen hours of labor, gave birth to a son with a birth defect called spina bifida. “We didn’t see it at first,” she said. “We saw a larger head and a foot that was a little odd and distorted. But when the nurse picked him up, then we saw this huge opening in his back, which is a spina bifida.” Laura was “devastated. Just devastated. We—I went through a severe depression afterward.” Moore is just one of many people worried about VDTs. In Massachusetts a pregnant journalist, fearing radiation, wore a leaded apron. (A leaded apron’s weight on the mother might itself harm an unborn child.) At the _New York Times_ two young editors developed cataracts and filed for workers compensation, blaming their computer screens. “We’ve heard of cases of everything from bad dreams of computers chasing people to psychic distress where people have attacks of depression,” says Michael Smith, the ex-NIOSH man. “But it can’t be linked specifically to the VDT.” And yet NIOSH as of this writing was continuing safety studies. “We might find that it has nothing to do with the video tubes,” Smith says of problem pregnancies among terminal operators. “It could be part of the circuitry.... It may be from job stress.” Meanwhile, proven problems—like eyestrain—bedevil men and women on the tube. When 1,236 secretaries and word processing-operators replied to a survey done for a major disk-maker, almost 70 percent worried about potential health complication. Some 63 percent told of eyestrain, and 36 percent reported backaches. Almost 80 percent wanted better lighting and more time to rest their eyes. So, regardless of how your equipment supplier vouches for your computers’ safety, keep two facts in mind: