Sit at Your Desk and Die or Stand and Look Stupid: The Ultimate Office Dilemma
Bad news: A doctor at Mayo Clinic has come up with a new disease: "sitting disease," which is caused by too much inactivity and can increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, much like smoking. To offset the ill effects of sitting all day, he recommends one of those standing desks which, while extending your life, are as aesthetically appealing as that mask Kobe Bryant is wearing these days. (Dr. James Levine, who invented—er, discovered sitting disease works on one of those treadmill desks.)
Maybe someday working at a desk while walking on a treadmill will not be viewed as the weird peccadillo of the kind of health nut who might have a room in his basement dedicated to pressing quinoa and exotic berries into energy bars. (Bloomberg could help by taxing the hell out of chairs, and outlawing sitting in city parks.) Maybe future office workers will be amused/disgusted by all our prehistoric sitting like we are by the sexism in "Mad Men." But at this point, even proof that standing at your desk gives you x-ray vision would not convince most workers to be that one person in the office towering over everyone, pierced by the scornful stares of all your coworkers slowly sitting themselves to death below.