Hot desking is popular in private and public sector offices to cut down on leased office space. The former Australian Taxation Office worker, now aged 56, experienced severe neck and shoulder pain one day in April 2011 and felt her desk and chair heights had been changed. Her supervisors at first told her no one else had used the workstation. A day later, her superiors apologised and said casual staff had used the workstation and had made adjustments. The woman said it took several weeks for an occupational health and safety representative to return the workstation to previous settings. "The ergonomic adjustments were major," she wrote. "The chair height and back rest, the desk height, the distance of the monitor the height of the monitor."

The woman said cortisone injections were needed to manage her pain. The details of her case are outlined in an Administrative Appeals Tribunal decision. It shows Comcare paid the woman compensation from 2011 to 2013 for aggravation of neck pain and the sprain of her shoulder and upper right arm. In its decision, the tribunal upheld a previous Comcare decision to refuse the woman ongoing compensation because she had a diagnosed degenerative disease which it said would have been causing her current pain. The woman was first compensated for work-related neck and shoulder pain in 2005. Following this, she sat at a workstation with important ergonomic settings suited to her and had the sign at her desk.