What is it with desks that bothers me so? Every time I see a desk in a movie, or in someone else's office, the hairs on my subconscious neck rise.
According to current thinking, expressed on coffee mugs and grubby print-outs stuck up in offices, there are two types of desks. The first is the tidy desk, which is apparently 'the sign of a sick mind'. The second is the untidy desk which is the subject of a hundred and one jokes, none of them funny enough to crack a smile, let alone laugh out loud.
The sickness involved in a clean desk seems to be an obsessive-compulsive disorder that forces people to put away papers and align pens the way some people wash their hands forty or fifty times a day.
On the other hand, there are several other possibilities. The owner of the desk might be someone who is too lazy to put any work on the desk in the first place. Or he or she may be so powerful, that he or she signs his or her missives 'your humble servant', and that any work on the desk is immediately rerouted to another desk by a vigilant PA.
The untidy desk comes with a different set of paradigms. A quick look at the dates on at the bottom of the piece of the oldest-looking pile could indicate that the owner of the desk is too lazy to get any work done, or that the occupant is no good at filing, or that the person has way, way, way too much to do.
It could also be that the person with the untidy desk works under a person with a tidy desk. Your guess is as good as mine. However, if there is any value in the thought, perhaps we could begin to formulate a thesis concerning the symbiosis between the two different types of desks.
If there are ten units of work that are really worth doing in a two-desk office and desk one contains two units of work, then desk two must contain eight units of work, or seven if you include the variable of the unit of work that is moving between offices or that is gathering dust on top of the filing cabinet in the corner.
It's not entirely the stuff of which Nobel Prizes are made, but it is a fun thought with which to toy.
Both the clean and messy desk get to me, but the one which really blows me away is the one with the neat little piles of work lined up on the edge according to job. Isn't sorting and piling them in that manner a complete waste of time that could be allocated to actually doing the job? No, patting the edges of each pile to make sure that they are tidy does not count as productivity.
My own desk is somewhere between the messy and tidy. It's in a cramped corner of the lounge. It has a row of books, a racks for disks, a couple of piles tucked away and gathering dust behind the monitor, and enough space for me to put my elbows, coffee mug and ashtray down without causing a catastrophe
There are ways to free the body and mind from the desk: taking a laptop outside, or going and sitting with a pen and paper on the comfy couch in the lobby. But these methods are frowned upon. People still can't easily acquaint comfort and relaxation with the idea of work.
Interior and design magazines spend a huge amount of time on presenting 'looks' for bathrooms, bedrooms, and small dark corners where the dog used to lie. Why don't they spend more time on giving ideas for working spaces?
Most of our white collar lives will be spent behind desks, staring at walls, monitors and poky windows. We will spend more time behind desks than in designer bedrooms or artfully tiled kitchens. Yet this most functional of spaces will end up being treated as a guilty secret, and a 'by-the-way'.
Perhaps the people who work for design magazines don't like their desks much either.
No comments:
Post a Comment