Many occupations, including white-collar positions, require some degree of manual labor. When assigned to a research team for an oil and gas company during a summer internship, my responsibilities included collecting hand-written reports and data from team members, recording it in an Excel spreadsheet, and creating status and progress charts for the team leader and members. Although this type of work is routine and can even be enjoyable since it affords some level of creativity in determining what types of graphic presentations are best suited for different types of data, the data entry process involved both coding the hand-written reports and entering this data into the spreadsheet, making it as especially tedious and time-consumer enterprise.

After about 2 weeks of this type of work non-stop, I noticed a pain in my lower back and neck which was not alleviated with my conventional, cure-all “miracle drug” (aspirin). Since the research team’s work was nearly completed, I decided to soldier through the pain and finish the work I had been assigned, a decision that I would soon regret. On the one hand, the research team succeeded in meeting their 4-week deadline and delivered a professionally prepared bound report as well as an attractive PowerPoint presentation concerning their findings. On the other hand, though, the pain in my neck and back worsened to the point where I was forced to visit an already overcrowded emergency room on the Friday night following the project’s completion where I received 3 days of bed rest, some muscle relaxers and advice to “take it easy for awhile.” In retrospect, the self-inflicted stress in meeting the project’s deadline and the unaccustomed repetitive work at the keyboard over several weeks combined to cause this otherwise preventable outcome. On a final note, the project was cancelled.