New Depths

Welcome to my first ever desk review!

As you may have gathered, I've been struggling to come up with a new theme for my blog since my survey of world toilets finally came to an end.

I've had my first real experience of 'hot-desking' (or 'free-desking' as I like to call it- more accurate, since the desks in question aren't hot but they are free, and sounds a bit like 'free-basing'- that's right, I'm exploiting the dubious glamour of drug abuse) recently, so I thought I'd give that the same treatment.

Not sure if it will become a regular thing, as it sounds alarmingly like I'm being serious. Talking about stuff in a vaguely conceited way just isn't the same when it's not scatalogical. It does have the advantage that those of you who work in the same office (which is probably about half of you) can see if you can guess whose desk I'm talking about. Whoo!

Desk #1

Position-
In the corner of the office furthest from the door, with only a sidelong view of two of the other members of staff and one’s back to the majority, it gives a disconcerting feeling that everyone can see you, but you can’t see them. One finds oneself turning more and more away from one’s workstation in a desperate bid to bring a bit more of the office into even peripheral vision. The nearest window does little to alleviate this feeling of facing the corner like a dunce, looking out at an oblique angle at a brick wall with only a hint of dark green conifers beyond.

Workstation-
The real highlight of this machine is the mouse. An optical model with a long, light lead that never seems to drag, it allows one to describe arcs both sweeping and accurate across the screen by sliding it over nothing but bare desktop.

But that’s nothing to what happens when you get there. To call it a click would be an injustice. Despite having only a short travel, the button yields smoothly yet firmly to the touch, bringing the finger up shorter than perhaps expected, but with enough satisfying give left at the end to avoid abruptness, like stepping through a thin layer of snow to find a springy lawn beneath. This short yet joyous downward journey imbues each ‘click’ (for want of a better word- the mouse certainly produces no such sound) with all the elegant, effortless decision of a Roger Federer backhand. In fact, such is the momentous finality that each ‘click’ seems to impart, if one finds that it was made in error, one cannot bring oneself to select ‘undo’, resorting instead to a shamefaced, surreptitious Ctrl+z.

And it is all too apt that one should scurry to the keyboard in such moments of weakness. The keyboard shouldn’t be spoken of in the same breath as the mouse, let alone used in conjunction with it. A dirty beige relic of the dark ages of computer design, it has a crunchy, uneven feel; typing on it is like biting into a dry, stale cracker. To make matters worse, in a piece of early 00s madness, the designers have substituted a euro symbol for half the right-hand shift button. Perhaps the person responsible was a euro-sceptic, creating a subtle allegory for EU interference- every time one wants to make bold with a capital letter, one finds oneself confronted by this symbol of bureaucracy. Perhaps, conversely, it was a prophecy that we would have that referendum and join the euro ourselves, so people would naturally want it at the tip of their little fingers. Whatever the reason, in remains as pointless as a smoking ban in Holland and as irritating as Robert Kilroy-Silk.

This contrast between the mouse and the keyboard is reflected in the matt black flat-screen monitor sitting proudly on top of the desk and the whirring grey monster lurking beneath it. All in all, this is one of those inconsistent, near-schizophrenic workstations that all too often result from upgrading one piece at a time, cannibalising the still-functioning parts of otherwise obsolete machines to create a monster worthy of Dr. Frankenstein.