The mystery of the disappearing desks

I blogged before about how people keep saying "things you have around the house" for things that I don't have around the house.

One thing I do have around the house is a desk. And, with the pandemic, I was surprised to learn just how many people don't have a desk.


My high-school graduation gift was a computer - a desktop computer, because that's what my father thought was most suitable. Laptop computers did exist in those days, but in the days before wifi you were tethered to a wall if you want to use the internet anyway, so desktops were a lot more common.

I set up my computer on my desk in my childhood bedroom, and subsequently on the desk in my dorm room and, being an internet addict, I spent most of my waking hours there, talking on the internet to other people who were also at their desktop computers tethered to the wall.

When I got my first apartment, I brought in my furniture from my childhood bedroom (my parents had the foresight to furnish our childhood bedrooms with regular grownup furniture rather than small/cutesy child-specific furniture). It was a small apartment, but my computer was still my top priority in my waking hours, so I set up my desk right in the living room, so I could continue my habit of spending time on the internet talking to other people also sitting at their desks.

Around this time I learned about ergonomics at work, so I applied the same principles to my desk at home. My set-up in student housing had been unergonomic and caused me a lot of neck pain, so I wanted something more sustainable for my adult life.

Then, when I got a laptop, I saw no reason not to continue with my comfy, ergonomized desk. I connected the laptop to my ergonomic peripherals, and kept right on spending my days at my desk, talking to people on the internet who, I had every reason to believe, were also at their desks.


Then, when the pandemic came along and everyone who can work from home started doing so, I was shocked to discover that the internet was full of people who . . . don't own a desk!!!  All these people whom I'd always pictured as being at their desks were suddenly setting up makeshift workstations at kitchen tables and on couches and in bed . . .

Where did all the desks go??


I do understand intellectually that you can internet on laptops and mobile devices, but I've always found working at a desk more comfortable and convenient.

I also understand that many people live in small homes - I do myself!  It's just my desk has always been so important to me that it's my second priority, after a bed.

So it's quite astonishing to me that it's such a low priority for so many people that "how to work from home when you don't have a desk" was a major topic of conversation in the early days of the pandemic!


But in addition to the question of "Why don't people have desks?" there's also the question of "What happened to the desks that people used to have?"

A lot of the "no desk, now what?" that's reaching me is coming from people who have been on the internet (in a personal capacity, not just for work or school) for at least as long as I have. Which means that, once upon a time, they almost certainly must have had a desk in their home - even if not a literal desk, then a designated table where a computer could be set up.

And now they don't.  They must have, at some point, gotten rid of the literal desk. Which is so bizarre to me - they looked at what I consider the second most important piece of furniture in a home, and thought "I don't anticipate ever needing to fulfill this function again."

Or what if they never had them in the first place? What if, for all these years, all these people on the internet I thought were sitting at their desks actually weren't?

That would be interesting to study - survey people who were caught out without a desk in the pandemic and ask them if they've ever owned a desk.


If you had asked me, back in the 90s when I was setting up my very own computer at my very own desk, to predict what will happen in the world in the year 2020, I would never have come up with "A lot fewer people own desks"!