Mix Asks: Is Your Job Killing You?

I traveled on business four of five weekdays last week (including my birthday), as well as the entirety of two weeks prior (including one weekend). I'm traveling on business tomorrow. Beginning next Monday, I'm on the road for another two straight weeks. And, of course, while I'm traveling the 'normal' in-office deadlines don't disappear, or even get extended. It's a situation with which I know many of you can intimately relate. And it's perhaps why the May issue of Mix resonated so strongly with me.

Granted, Mix's target audience is recording, mixing, mastering and other audio engineers, as well as musicians, who have some unique challenges that readers of EDN don't necessarily face. I'm not aware, for example, that it's common practice to snort lines of cocaine off the lab test bench….although I could be wrong! However, I think there's a lot of common ground and, therefore, a lot to learn from Mix's articles' words. To wit, is a marathon recording session that different from a marathon debugging session? Is a multi-week one-city-per-day band tour that different from the bunch'o business travel that I'm currently slogging through? And is your office layout a carpal tunnel syndrome's dream?

Check out the articles below, as well as any others that catch your eye, and then please leave your thoughts in the comments.

• Confronting Taboos
• It's Your Life, Dammit!
• Bring Down The Noise (which, along with The Quiet Stage, only peripherally related to my job, but which I still found interesting for their solid descriptions of the human auditory system, its degradation in the face of regular high-volume sound, and the various means of minimizing hearing loss)
• Words From The Wise
• Road Reality Check
• Finding Your Oasis
• Striking A Balance
• Studio Ergonomics

p.s. Some of you may be wondering why the lessons I professed to have learned last fall haven't stuck. That's an excellent question; it's one I regularly ask myself….