Showing posts with label thoughts from the shower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thoughts from the shower. Show all posts

Monday, October 02, 2023

"And also" is the key to appreciating the little things in life

I blogged previously about the idea of "and also", which helps reconcile the fact that we live in a complex and imperfect world. 
 
I'm also finding lately that "and also" makes the idea of living in the moment/looking on the bright side/appreciating the little things in life more palatable.
 

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom I've received has been "Yeah, the world is on fire. But look on the bright side - we have delicious peaches!"

Which makes no sense whatsoever! The fact that it's peach season cannot possibly mitigate the fact that the world is on fire!

But consider: "The world is on fire. And also, we have delicious peaches."

Clearly, the sensible thing to do is eat and savour the peaches!

It doesn't claim to fix, mitigate, or outweigh the problem. It is simply another thing, separate from the problem, that comes with a logical course of action.
 
Some days, that makes it easier to get through the day.

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Advice for the Ask A Manager letter writer who found scales in the break room

 
There was a lot of discussion of this in the comment thread and in other parts of the internet. Some people thought that it was clearly judgmental passive-aggression about people's weight. Other people thought that weight loss is important and if you think there's something wrong with encouraging people to lose weight you have Issues. And other people thought that, regardless of who put the scales there or why, they must be someone's personal property so it would be wrong to mess with them.

My shower recently gave me an approach that would address all these possibilities and more.
 
If your office has a culture of people leaving stuff in the break room for anyone who wants it to take (for example, if someone baked cookies or got a free sample they don't need), you could ask "Are these scales here free to take?"
 
(In fact, you might even be able to ask this if you don't have a "freebies in the break room" culture.)

If the answer is yes, you can take the scales away away and they won't be there any more. Or leave them there, knowing that they're just an innocent giveaway.

And if they're there for some other reason, this creates an opening for the person who put them there to explain.

And if no one speaks up and says "I put them there for this very specific reason," then there's no reason not to get rid of them, since apparently they don't belong to anyone.

As an added bonus, this approach would also avoid making you come across as someone who has Issues About Weight Loss, which sometimes is detrimental to your credibility when you're surrounded by people who think Weight Loss Is Important. In fact, it might even make the Weight Loss Is Important people think you're one of them, because you come across as wanting a free scale. (Should you have to appease the Weight Loss Is Important people? Of course not! But sometimes it's a better decision not to throw away capital when you don't have to, even if the basis is silly.)

I suppose it's possible that someone might have put them there for a reason and not speak up when prompted to do so and subsequently complain when you take the scales away, but that seems vanishingly likely.

Monday, August 15, 2022

Defining the intersection of walkable and accessible

A Venn diagram of two circles. One is labled " walkable", the other is labled" accessible", the overlapping area is labeled with question marks
I keep running up against the problem of not being able to find a good word for the overlap between "walkable" and "accessible". So I'm writing it down in a whole lot of words here, so I can point to it next time I'm trying to articulate the concept.
 

Why won't the word "walkable" do?
 
Some people interpret "walkable" as "accessible only to people who can walk, and therefore inaccessible to people in wheelchairs etc." That is never what I mean, so I clearly need a better word.

Why won't the word "accessible" do?

Some people interpret "accessible" in a way that doesn't necessarily include walkable. For example, they might say the grocery store is accessible if you can drive up, park in the disabled parking spaces right in front of the door, and roll your wheelchair in the door unimpeded - even if the only way to get to the store is by driving on a highway that has no sidewalks.

What concepts does this word need to encompass?
 
- Proximity: Things need to be close enough that walking/wheeling/otherwise going without a vehicle is easy. Your destination is close enough to your point of origin that you don't need a vehicle. (Q: Close enough for whom? A: The end users, whoever they might be.)

- Safety: You aren't going to get hit by a car. You aren't going to slip and fall on the ice. You aren't going to get harassed by creeps on the street.

- Lack of obstacles: There are no cobblestones that would make it difficult to use a wheelchair. You don't have to go out of your way to find a crosswalk. There is a clear, suitable path to wherever you are going.

- The "no-brainer" factor: I walk to the grocery store because it's across the street - using any sort of vehicle (even a bike) would be ridiculous. If you're going to multiple stores in an indoor mall, you aren't going to go outside and get into your car and drive your car to the next store. If you're going to multiple destinations on the same city block, you aren't going to drive between them - even if you drove to the city block, you're going to park your car once and head to all your destinations on foot or in a wheelchair or otherwise without a vehicle.

Anyone know a word that does all this and is clear and common enough for me to use in translations?

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Cause and effect

In 2009, City of Toronto workers, including garbage collectors, went on strike because the employer was trying to take away their sick days and leave them with a much worse arrangement.
 
Media coverage at the time (including, bizarrely, the Toronto Star, whose stated principles explicitly include being pro-labour) villainized these workers, stoking public anger against them.

Rob Ford leveraged this anger to be elected as mayor.

Doug Ford leveraged Rob Ford's apparent popularity to be elected first as city councillor, then as MPP, and eventually as Premier of Ontario.

Where he took sick days away from workers in a pandemic, among many other disastrous policies.

Here in this third year of a pandemic that those in power have no desire to end, I wonder where we as a city and as a province would be if the City of Toronto hadn't tried to take away workers' sick days.

There wouldn't have been a strike. Rob Ford wouldn't have become mayor. Doug Ford would be running a label company (or would be city councillor at worst). Ontario would almost certainly have a government better suited to the task of getting us through a pandemic. (And also, Toronto municipal workers would have a better sick day regime and therefore be better able to avoid spreading COVID.) Toronto would likely have a different municipal government as well, since it was Rob Ford's mayorality that led to John Tory being considered even remotely palatable. (Remember in 2007 when Ontario rejected him for being too far right?)

***

On a personal note, there's one vital thing that would be different:

One change made under Rob Ford's mayorality was to contract out part of Toronto's garbage collection to Green For Life.

On February 17, 2018, at 2:30 in the morning, I was in bed fast asleep when I was frightened awake by a horrific noise.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window to see what the noise was . . . and woke up on the floor with an enormous lump on the back of my head.

Every aspect of life has been more difficult since.

The source of the noise that frightened me awake? A Green For Life contractor seemed to think 2:30 in the morning is a good time to empty a dumpster into a dump truck.

Butterfly wings.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Flaws in my antiracism education: educating us like children rather than future adults

If I'm talking to one of the adults who was around when I was a kid and I mention one of my racism-related shortcomings, such as the fact that I was blithely ignorant of the racist tropes contained in the media I was consuming, their response is invariably "But you were just a kid!"
 
Yes, I was just a kid. 

And now I'm not. Now I'm a middle-aged adult. A middle-aged adult who's woefully inadequate at even spotting racism, to say nothing of countering racism. 
 
And, as a middle-aged adult who's established in my profession and my community, I have (or am perceived to have) a certain amount of influence. I have no actual authority, but I can sometimes set the tone. If I say "This is a problem we should do something about," I tend to get listened to, insofar as even if they opt not to address the problem, they take seriously the fact that I see a problem. 
 
Unfortunately, when it comes to racism, I am currently too ignorant to reliably see the problems. Even though I'm trying to do the work and learn about problems that exist and what I can do about them, I haven't yet developed the ability to extrapolate from what I've learned and identify other problems that I haven't specifically read about or been told about.

If my antiracism education had led me to start thinking along these lines, maybe I'd be better at it. Maybe by the time I'd aged into the privilege and influence that comes with being an established middle-aged adult, I'd have been thinking about it for longer and have come up with some clue about how to actually make use of that privilege and influence.


My other posts in this series have been entitled "flaws in my education". This one is entitled "flaws in my antiracism education", because the other aspects of my education did in fact assume that I personally and my peers in general would eventually be in positions of authority or influence. 
 
"Leadership" was a buzzword when I was in high school. Our teachers would compliment us or respond to others' compliments of us by saying "They're leaders!" If you'd asked any of the adults involved in our upbringing and education, they would absolutely have agreed that we would eventually be in positions of authority or influence, hiring people, training people, making decisions that affect people's lives and affect broader policy, righting the wrongs of the past.

Except, apparently, when it came to racism. Then we were just a bunch of kids who couldn't possibly be expected to know better.
 
Which is an obstacle on the path to becoming adults who can do better.

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Hard work

Conventional wisdom is that hard work is a virtue.  If you work hard, you will achieve success.


I think we need to question the notion that work needs to be hard to be adequate.


Some people, when they read that, will have the visceral reaction of "Oh, you just don't want to work!"

But that's not the argument I'm making here today.

For the purposes of today's blog post, I'm not questioning the "work" part, I'm just questioning the "hard" part.

(I know there are other people questioning the "work" part and I'm not going to get in their way, that's just not my topic here today.)


When I think of everything I've ever done well, I've never worked hard at any of it. I simply...did it. I carried out the necessary actions, did the thing, and it was done and done well.

So, you might be thinking, what would happen if I did work hard at it?

And the answer is that it would be impossible to work hard at it, because I finished it before the work got hard.


Analogy: you can't sprint one step. You simply take the step, and you've completed it before you can even get up to a sprinting level of effort. (Unless, of course, you can't take any steps.  But then you can't sprint one step either.)


There are also quite a few things in life that I've worked hard at.  And, despite my hard work, I never reached the point of doing them well. I basically knocked myself out to achieve mediocrity.


Before we even look at it from our own perspective as workers, if we look at it just from the perspective of having a functional economy and society, people knocking themselves out to achieve mediocrity is the last thing we want!

If you're in the market for a product or service, you want that product to be made or that service to be provided by someone who knows what they're doing.  The more important it is and the harder it is to do, the more you want someone who's certain they can do it well.  
 
You want a beautician who makes people way uglier than you look way hotter than you've ever aspired to, no one who isn't sure if they can make eyebrows like yours look good but they'll try their best. You want a renovator who thinks the work you have in mind is so easy they don't see why you don't do it yourself, not one who's unsure whether it's possible but is willing to give it the good old college try. You want a surgeon who could do your surgery in their sleep, not one who for whom it's a reach goal.
 
Essentially, if someone is working hard, it's a sign that something is wrong - insufficient training, too-tight timelines, not the right person for the job, etc.
 
Maybe, instead of valuing hard work, we as a society should be working on eliminating it.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

What if we measured beauty standards in labour required to be unremarkable or credible?

When we talk about beauty standards - and, especially, when we talk about beauty standards for women (so much of the beauty standard discourse to which I've been exposed is so binary that I can't entirely get away from that in this post) - the discourse tends to get hijacked by people's personal opinions about beauty.

"But I think curvy women are hot!" "But men have to work hard to have a six-pack too!" "But beauty is frivolous anyway and you should just have good self-esteem!"

I think it would be far more useful if, instead of talking about beauty in and of itself, we talked about it in terms of labour. How much time/money/effort do people of various demographics need to spend to meet standards?

I also think it would be useful if, instead of talking about beauty standards, we talked about, for lack of a better word, "non-ugly" standards. How much labour is required to not be perceived negatively, to pass unremarked?
 
Example: 
 
Suppose you're watching the men's soccer world cup on TV, and you can see a player's leg hair.

Now, suppose you're watching the women's soccer world cup on TV, and you can see a player's leg hair.

Your immediate internal response to the men's scenario is probably "And...?" or "Only one?" Whereas, in the women's scenario, people would notice. They may well be too polite to comment, but if, in a safe and non-judgemental space, you asked friend who'd been watching the same game "Did you notice that one player had visible leg hair?" they almost certainly would have. Some people would speak positively of it ("Good for her, flouting social norms!") but it would be noticed.

In this context, the men's soccer players have to do no work whatsoever for their leg hair situation to be unremarkable, whereas the women's soccer players would have to remove any leg hair visible to the camera for their leg hair situation to be unremarkable.

I think this is a much more useful approach to this discourse.
 
It would also be useful to look at how much labour is required to be perceived as credible.

How much labour do people of various demographics need to do for their job interviewer to think they look professional? How much labour do people need to do to be taken seriously by the doctor/mortgage officer/prospective landlord? How much labour is involved in politicians of various demographics being perceived as camera-ready for their interview?
 
Being perceived as beautiful may be frivolous, but most people need to get business done at some point in their lives, and need to come across as credible to do so. For some people, that requires labour, and any demographic patterns to the amount of labour involved raise a genuine equity issue.

Thursday, September 16, 2021

Things They Should Invent: "Browsing-Friendly" sign for small businesses

When I have to do in-person shopping for clothes, I prefer to shop in a mall. That's because mall stores are more browsing-friendly - you can drift in and out, getting a sense of what's available, and it's all very low-commitment.

In contrast, I dislike shopping for clothes in small businesses with main street (Yonge St.) storefronts, because it feels like more of a commitment to walk in. I don't know what they stock, I don't know if it will meet my needs, I don't know what the prices will be like, but I still have to walk in (with the door often ringing a bell when I do so), usually walk right past the owner and either take up their time helping me or dissuade them from helping me before I can even see if the contents of the store meet my needs well enough to even try things on. And then, if nothing meets my needs, I have to look the owner dead-ass in the eye and tell them that I'm not going to be helping them with their livelihood today.

It would be so much easier - and I would be so much more likely to shop for clothes at small neighbourhood stores - if I could browse them like mall stores!

But it also occurs to me that there are likely a non-zero number of small business owners who wouldn't mind if I did just that.

If only there was a way to tell who they are!

Solution: a standardized "Browsing-Friendly" sign that small businesses can put in their window, indicating that they have no objection to people wandering in and idly browsing their wares without any commitment to buy.

This would encourage customers to browse small businesses they might otherwise be reluctant to enter, thereby increasing the likelihood of customers finding the products they need in small businesses and of small businesses capturing market share that would otherwise go to mall stores. 
 
Win-win situation!

Tuesday, September 07, 2021

The mysterious missing verses of The Tottenham Toad

Some snippets of a children's song popped into my head recently, starting with "The Tottingham Toad went hopping down the road..."

So I googled around, and the internet is unanimous about the lyrics:
The Tottenham Toad came trotting down the road 
With his feet all swimming in the sea 
Pretty little squirrel with your tail in curl 
They’ve all got a wife but me.

Here's the weird part: the internet says that this is the whole song, but I clearly remember it has having three verses! I distinctly remember other lines from the song, and there is no record of them on the internet.

I remember the following lines:

- "The Wimbledon Whale he stood upon his tail" 
- "The Canterbury Crow said 'Now I have to go'"
- "As he drank three cups of bread and tea"
- "It's so sad it fills me full of glee" 
- "Lazy little lynx she just sits and winks"

And zero of these lines appear on the googleable (or duckduckgoable or bingable) internet!

I'm particularly confident about the "lynx" line because Child!Me had never heard of a lynx, so I wouldn't have made up or misremembered in the direction of something I'd never heard of. Wimbledon might be wrong, because Child!Me had heard of Wimbledon and therefore might have interpolated it into the lyrics.
 
Has any other human being in the world heard these verses, or are they completely lost to history?

Sunday, September 05, 2021

Could an eBay-style bidding system help painlessly cool the real estate market?

EBay uses an automatic bidding system. Every bidder enters their maximum bid, and the system automatically places incremental bids on each bidder's behalf.
 
For example, bidding starts at $1. Alice is the first bidder, and she places a maximum bid of $5. The system displays a current bid of $1.
 
Then Bob comes along and places a maximum bid of $4. The system automatically places incremental bids on Alice's and Bob's behalf (as though they're sitting in an auction house shouting "$1.25!" "$1.50!" at each other) until it hits Bob's maximum of $4. Now it shows Alice in the lead with a bid of $4.25.
 
If there are no other bidders, Alice will pay $4.25 for the item.

This means that the winning bid is one increment higher than the second-highest bid, regardless of the winning bidder's highest bid. In other words, if Alice had set a maximum bid of $1,000 and Bob had set a maximum bid of $4, Alice would still pay $4.25 for the item.
 

I wonder if this kind of system could help cool the housing market?

During the pandemic, housing prices across the country skyrocketed. Conventional wisdom is that this is because city residents with city real estate money were buying exurban real estate and driving up the prices.

Why, I wondered, were they paying city prices for exurban properties? Even if you have city real estate money, why wouldn't you pay the exurban price for the exurban property?

The answer, I was told, is bidding wars.


So I wonder if the problem could be fixed by building a better bidding war?

My idea: inspired by eBay's system, every potential buyer enters their maximum bid, and an automatic system bids them against each other. The end result is that the highest bid is a dollar higher than the second-highest bid.

That way, if the prices are being driven up by outlier buyers, they won't be driven up to higher than the going rate.

The seller wouldn't suffer particularly from this. Any sensible seller would budget and plan for their home going at roughly the current going rate, and a dollar higher than the second-highest bid would fall within the going rate. Like on eBay, they could still have the option to set a reserve price, so if no one bids a high enough amount, they don't sell at all.

Perhaps this kind of system could also be adapted to let buyers bid on multiple homes and then retract their bid once they've bought a home, so you wouldn't have to wait for one bidding war to end before expressing interest in another possibility. One person withdraws, the next highest bid automatically wins, no big deal.


But would this actually help cool the housing market? I'm not sure! If there are multiple above-market bidders, it wouldn't change a thing. But if there's just one above-market bidder, this system would prevent them from driving up the price.

I guess the flip side to that question is: would this kind of bidding system cause any harm? Or would the worst case scenario result in the same housing prices as the current system, but perhaps with less stress, and perhaps sometimes letting buyers get a home without fully leveraging?

I don't know the answer to that question. It would be interesting if someone could study this.

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Magic Words: "or . . . ?"

A thing that exists in the world: well-intentioned people who have innocent questions that they want to ask for a good reason.
 
Another thing that exists in the world: assholes who are cruel and malicious under the guise of asking innocent questions for a good reason.

If you're a well-intentioned person who has a good reason for asking an innocent question of the sort that cruel, malicious assholes might weaponize, you can often disarm your question with one simple conjunction: "or".

Scenario:

Cousin Dorothy has just announced her engagement! Congratulations, Dorothy!

Traditionally, you've been invited to your cousins' weddings, but you know that event planning isn't exactly Dorothy's thing, so she might have a smaller wedding that doesn't go as far as inviting the cousins. (After all, if you invite one cousin you have to invite them all, and there are just so many cousins!)
 
You happen to own a wedding-appropriate dress, but it has long sleeves. You'd get overheated if you wore it in the summer. 
 
So you want to find out when Dorothy's wedding is going to be, without being seen to presume that you'll be invited.
 
Normally, this could be achieved with a simple small-talk question: "So have you set a date yet?"
 
The problem is your family also includes Auntie Em. Auntie Em is very vocally judgmental about many things, and one of the things she's vocally judgmental about is "you're only engaged if you have a wedding date set."

So if you were to ask "Have you set a date yet?" you could come across as being judgmental like Auntie Em, as though you're setting up to gotcha Dorothy for not having a date set yet.

You can avoid giving this impression with one simple word: "or . . . ?"

Instead of simply asking the question that might come across as judgmental, add at least one alternative, and deliver them verbally with a rising and trailing "or".

"So have you set a date yet? Or are you just enjoying being engaged? Or . . . ?"
 
Presenting a perfectly reasonable alternative that is no less positive creates the impression that you think it's perfectly valid not to have set a date. You're making it clearer that you're not being judgmental like Auntie Em.

The function of the final "Or . . . ?" is, explicitly, to avoid setting up a false binary (assholes like Auntie Em often set up false binaries as gotchas) and, implicitly, to make it clearer that you understand there are a wide range of situations in life and you're open to whatever they might say here in response.

The final "Or . . . ?" also help with tone. Sometimes, the tone and delivery of "A or B?" can come out as judgey. (Imagine the tone that would be used for "Want a cup of tea? Or do you think you're too good for tea?") Ending with a rising and trailing "Or . . . ?" reduces the risk of producing this tone.

Some other examples:

Compare asking your host "Do you want me to make the bed?" vs. "Do you want me to make the bed? Or strip the bed? Or . . . ?" With the second option, you're acknowledging that different options are convenient for different people and you're absolutely open to doing whatever is most convenient.

Compare asking your boss "What do you want me to do if Important Client comes in while you're in the meeting?" vs. "If Important Client comes in while you're in the meeting, do you want me to come get you? Or take care of them myself? Or . . . ?" You recognize that there are nuances, you've taken the initiative of thinking of a couple of ideas yourself rather than making your boss come up with solutions, you're showing that you're open and amenable to doing whatever your boss thinks best.


At this point, some people might be thinking "Instead of all this strategic conjunction use, why not just be direct and ask Dorothy whether you'll need a summer dress for her wedding?"

And sometimes you can do that! In which case, you don't need me! Go forth and say whatever you want!

But sometimes that causes interpersonal problems. And, in these cases, you can often smooth things over with the judicious application of one simple word: "or . . . ?"

Sunday, June 06, 2021

Magic Words: "human being"

I've discovered a neat trick: you can intensify any sentence by replacing "person" (and similar synonyms) with "human being".
 
Compare: "I haven't hugged another person since before the pandemic" vs. "I haven't hugged another human being since before the pandemic."

The second one sounds a lot more dire, doesn't it?

Compare: "You used straight apostrophes in last month's newsletter and smart apostrophes in this month's newsletter. But no one else is going to notice." vs. "You used straight apostrophes in last month's newsletter and smart apostrophes in this month's newsletter. But no other human being is going to notice."
 
The likelihood of being noticed sounds a lot lower in the second one, doesn't it? (Even though, if you're really pedantic about it, "no other human being" is narrower in scope - "no one" could plausibly include dogs and aliens and AI.)
 
I love things like this, where minor changes in wording have clearly discernable changes in connotation, even though no one can explain why no human being can explain why!

Friday, April 09, 2021

The big stuck boat as an analogy for political disagreements in relationships

In reference to whether it's possible to have relationships with people with different politics, someone much smarter than me (and I wish I remembered who so I could give them credit) once said "You can disagree about what the solutions are, but you have to agree about what the problems are."

Sarah Gailey's excellent article "I Like That The Boat Is Stuck" provides a perfect analogy for this.
There's no debate over whether or not the big boat is stuck: it is a big boat, and it is stuck, and we are all aware of those facts, even those of us who are currently located in outer space.

Furthermore, most of us share the opinion that it's disagreeable, logistically, for the boat to be stuck. The boat being stuck is inconvenient. It's a big disruption! Nobody can say it isn't a big disruption. None of my distant relatives will get into arguments on The Face Website about whether or not the stuck boat is making a nuisance for lots of people. I like that.

We all agree that it's stuck, and we all agree that this is a bad thing. We might disagree about how best to get it unstuck. We might disagree about the amount of sacrifice that is reasonable to get it unstuck.  We might disagree about whether the other ships waiting to use the canal should keep waiting patiently or should detour around Africa. We might disagree about how to prevent similar problems in the future.
 
And we can have a civilized disagreement about that. We can, in fact, agree to disagree and go about our lives. If any of us are actually involved in unstuckening the ship, we can use the approach that we think is best, or pitch the approach that we think is best to our bosses. We can use multiple approaches in parallel. Ultimately, we're all on the same side.
 
But imagine that there's someone out there arguing that the ship isn't stuck. Or that the ship should be stuck. Or that more ships should be stuck. Imagine that, instead of discussing whether we should bring more diggers to dig the ship out or more tugboats to tug the ship out, they're bringing in diggers and tugboats working to get the ship even more firmly stuck.

That person is harder to get along with, aren't they?

Now imagine if, instead of a ship on the other side of the world, the problem is something more immediate, something that threatens your survival or safety or bodily integrity, or that of people you care about.

To use the example that's at the forefront of everyone's mind, you're trying to keep people safe from the virus, and but there's someone insisting the virus doesn't exist and advocating for activities that will spread the virus. 

They're just . . . in the way, aren't they?

If they're someone you already care about, you might feel it's worth keeping them in your life despite the fact that they're in the way. Or you might not. But if they're a new person, there's really no point in bringing them into your life if all they're going to do is get your boat more stuck.

Sunday, January 03, 2021

Vaccine conspiracy theory conspiracy theory

If I were to assemble the elements of the current situation into a conspiracy theory, that theory would be that people in positions of power were contributing to the spread of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and/or not working to debunk these theories to create conditions where those in positions of power would have to be at the front of the line for any vaccine roll-out in order to set an example.

If vaccine reluctance wasn't a thing, there would be no reason to vaccinate politicians and public figures ahead of front-line workers, health workers, food workers, etc. But now that vaccine reluctance is a thing, politicians and public figures can very publicly go straight to the front of the vaccine queue, be photographed getting their vaccine, and be lauded for setting a good example.

Wednesday, July 01, 2020

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"!