God and the CS Student

Recently, my e-mail account has been disappointing me. Long ago, I used to open my account to delight in the announcement that I had 17 new messages. Never mind that the vast majority of these were from people harassing me to help them redesign biological weapons for their student organizations, or from people I hadn't talked to in months forwarding me lists of the top 10 Mensa pick-up lines. Damn it, I felt loved. But alas, all that has changed. Now, a giant sucking sound is apparently echoing across Harvard's servers as a growing segment of the e-mailing population gradually logs out. The ominous silence they leave in their wake can be explained in three letters: RSI.

A good gauge of whether or not a disease has become a plague is what people are calling it. During the influenza epidemic of 1917, people abridged the disease's funny Latinate name to make it "the flu." The middle ages renamed the bubonic plague symptoms "posy," and our era has made us all familiar with the rather scientific acronym "AIDS." At Harvard today, a similar name adjustment has occurred. Suddenly, instead of "repetitive strain injury" or "repetitive stress injury" or "tendonitis" or any other variations on the theme, even unafflicted Harvard students have started to call our increasingly common problem by the abbreviation "RSI." RSI has moved from the realm of the scientific to the realm of casual lunch conversations. Everyone has heard of it. As a random sampling, I can count the number of victims I know on 10 gradually stiffening fingers.

The ailment, whose effects range from soreness and discomfort during extensive manual activity to permanent musculoskeletal damage to the hands, is difficult to explain. Ostensible caused include typing too much in uncomfortable positions, especially without taking breaks. Because of the role of Keyboarding in RSI, computer-science students run the highest risk. Yet for some reason, the lack of ergonomic keyboard equipment does not seem like a satisfying explanation for what has escalated from an annoyance into a bona fide plague. Why have so many students been struck by RSI? After thinking about it for quite some time, I realized that there can only be one answer: God hates computer-science students.

This explanation satisfied me for some time. After all, the Judeo-Christian God has been rumored to be a jealous God. And who wouldn't be jealous of people who spend their careers pushing back the borders of knowledge and getting paid ridiculously well for it, not to mention that they get to wear jeans and T-shirts to work every day? Not only that, but divine retribution on over-programmed programmers would be a neat way for a deity to get back at Harvard, the institution once devoted to the study of God and now devoted to the study of art, nature, society, technology, money and power. As those who sit at the apex of the esoteric and the practical, computer science students would be perfect subjects for divine wrath.

But soon, my refined moral calculus began disintegrating at my rapidly typing fingertips. I met a social studies concentrator with RSI. Then, a Russian literature student complained of tendonitis. But the final blow came when I met my most recent RSI-afflicted acquaintance, a student in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. Rolling and unrolling those Dead Sea Scrolls can be deadly, I know, but this was ridiculous. Now there was no excuse. I was forced to revise my thesis, and soon I arrived at the only acceptable explanation. God hates Harvard students. And you could be next.

Okay, so maybe the divine-retribution solution went out of style with the Book of Job. And maybe Harvard students are among the least likely persons on the planet to accept explanations involving deities of any sort. Yet RSI remains extremely disquieting, not only because it affects so many of us, but because it seems specifically designed to stunt our success. Of course, afflictions appropriate for Harvard students could have come in many forms. Harvard might have been plagued by Discussion Muteness Syndrome, in which long periods of babbling without frequent breaks would leave seminar jocks with stunted tongues, prevented from speaking in sentences more than a few words long. Or perhaps it might be discovered that the Office of Career Services is filled with asbestos, leaving those students who spend their days racing for the perfect job looking for disability insurance instead. Such afflictions are products of our nightmares; they are too clearly made up to punish us to actually exist. Yet although it fits all the criteria for being the worst possible malady for a student, the shocking fact is that RSI real.

And that's the biggest problem with RSI. Sure, we all know that physical maladies strike their victims randomly. We would hardly think to accuse cancer patients, for example, of being punished for undisclosed crimes. But as with all behavior-related preventable diseases, some unexpressed part of our psyche--and it is crucial that it remain unexpressed--feels a need to assign blame. We could always blame the University's administration (after all, this is the editorial page) for its failure to design workstations conducive to our health, but when we consider the fact that most students use their own computing equipment, this accusation holds little weight. It would be satisfying to point fingers at University Health Services and other campus offices and organizations for not alerting us enough to the dangers of overtyping. This claim is a fair one. Very little information about RSI has been publicized, and the information that does get posted is often inaccurate and poorly researched. But none of this alleviates the psychological burden of the plague.

Most of us are unwilling to believe the rather problematic explanation that some higher power has cursed us. But many of us, meritocrats that we are, are willing to believe at some inexpressible level that everything that happens to us occurs for a reason--or at the very least, that we can control our own actions and that those actions have consequences. So instead of divine retribution, we are forced to believe something much worse. By writing too much and not reading enough, by e-mailing too much and not phoning enough, by working too much and not playing enough, we could conceivably have brought this plague upon ourselves. Perhaps our hands are telling us something that our minds don't want to know. And that, if you have RSI, is too hard to handle.

Those who have not yet sinned the Harvard sin, keep your hands warm and your wrists straight. Take frequent breaks while typing, and don't bother sending me that extra e-mail forward. Instead, keep your hands healthy and safe, and you too will be shielded from the hands of an angry God.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.