Dear Icepack: you are my only true friend.

One of the perks of working for Jet Set Zero is that I get to make my own hours and, more importantly, my own office. From a very young age I’ve suffered from pretty severe lower back pain. It was actually one of the reasons I had to leave my job animating in New York: I just couldn’t handle sitting in an office chair anymore.

For those of you who have suffered similar spinal problems, you’ll know what I mean: sitting upright for longer than an hour or two in almost any type of seat will drive you slowly mad with pain.  I’ve tried kneeling chairs, sitting on exercise balls, $900 super-space chairs, everything.  There simply isn’t a comfortable upright working position for people in my condition.

So when I set up my editing suite (read: bedroom) for Jet Set Zero’s production office (read: apartment) I decided to take things a step further and build myself an actual standing desk.

I recommend anyone suffering from back pains and working in the desk-job world give this a shot if they can.  The working position is great and if your feet get tired it’s a lot easier to pull a laptop down with you onto the couch for a half hour than it is to stand yourself up after setting your ass into the mold of an office chair for half a day.

Besides that, it allows me to join a long and illustrious tradition of important historical figures who swear by the standing desk including Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Donald Rumsfeld.

One of these things is not like the others. Or two, depending on your search criteria.