The monitor height lecture from a 70 year old at the VA clinic stuck with me
I was sitting at a shared desk at my dad's VA appointment last month, hunched over like a shrimp messing with my phone. This older guy next to me, waiting for his name to be called, just goes "son, your neck is doing the work your chair should be doing." Then he pointed at the monitor on the desk and said the top of the screen should be at eye level, no exceptions. I laughed it off but then he showed me his own setup story, how he rigged a stack of old phone books under his monitor back in the 80s to fix his headaches. That made me actually check my home desk when I got back to Phoenix, and sure enough my screen was sitting about 4 inches too low. I grabbed a $12 riser off Amazon and within a week my upper back pain dropped a ton. Has anyone else gotten practical setup advice from some random stranger in a waiting room or something weird like that? Those quick conversations often beat hours of forum rabbit holes.