A SHORT HISTORY OF HOT DESKING,
OR, WHEN HOT DESKING WAS
PHRASE OF THE WEEK

I became conscious of the concept of hot desking about 20 years ago, when a senior colleague – putatively the second most senior employee in the company, albeit not a shareholder – returned from visiting one of his two families and found someone sitting at his presumptive desk, typing away. He was justifiably angry and his words were to the rhetorical effect of “when did we start hot desking?” There were plenty of work stations for everyone and it plainly wasn’t necessary for a desktop to be treated as an internet café or BA Lounge castoff when someone was out of the office.

The governor had been invited to a meeting at the consulting division of an engineering firm about three months beforehand, and as there’s a customary but no-nonsense gap between arrival and the host meet and greet, this consultancy has taken the courteous step of carving out a few square trendily designed meters as a dedicated waiting area, with bottles of high carbon footprint fair trade water and jugs of coffee/tea, available on a touch man, must move basis.

Not 48 hours later, the governor had called in mauve and taupe attired interior decorators and carpenters, to scope the remodelling potential of a far echelon of our office space, in which we could have a matching (mauve and taupe for the avoidance of doubt) cappuccino corner of our own, when we had guests to impress, or when co-workers needed a breakout space for brainstorming.

This was the short lived job at which the copyright on our website was on average two and a half years post-dated, because our IT guru could only be bothered to update that line of code once every five years. The governor lamented hiring ITG, because in Gov’s view he was just about capable of “plugging in a plug” of a new computer, into a socket, but not much else. This may be because fame went to his head and most duties were beneath him when he was interviewed on the street by his neighborhood paper, about what it felt like to be an ex-pat in his district. He wailed about shake me downs in the town hall, no doubt. Had LinkedIn existed then, lo, had LinkedIn existed then.

If someone sought to hot desk in principle, the cappuccino corner was available, because it was rarely utilized. I should acknowledge that it was a misnomer to call it Cappuccino Corner, because no one ever got around to buying an espresso machine, and we should have called in the men in white coats or the receivers as opposed to the carpenters, but more of that later.

It was thanks to this governor that I became aware of the term fly tipping in a practical circumstance some ten years hence, and although he looked glum when forced to appear before a magistrate who sided with next door over the substantial medical waste odors on his property, at least he missed out on jail, in contrast with Gyorgy. I will, however, flag that he was generous with his and the bank’s money (if not his time, because he’d occasionally slide the dividers over to run his second job of managing a for-profit youth football league). By contrast, I won’t say my last employer was cheap, although the urinals were coin operated …

How cheap were they.

The practice and naming of hot desking apparently derive from naval times, in which sailors were in the habit of “hot racking” or “hot bunking,” as an economic measure, and may have become an overnight success after only about 500 years. This information is from the internet and it may or may not be true, but it wasn’t important enough for me to spend more than 30 seconds looking up. Rather, the seafaring profession is alternately hailed and denounced for the supposed dominance of profanities in its vocabulary, but when the bow hits the waves, the lexicon and the jargon merge, and it gets the wrong rap. “Leeward” and “starboard,” etc, require more technical language capacity than generic driving directions such as left and right, back up would you, and, you need to make a U-turn. And may you have fair winds today.

In Norton’s famous drawing of the traveling salesman at the bar on 7100 Romaine Boulevard, the understood construct is that as soon as he sits down, the career bartender asks: “The usual?” and Timothy replies: “Yeah.” Timmo is sitting in his regular seat, and if he is forced to situate himself a few stools down because a couple from out of town don’t know the ground rules or the rules of the road and have pre-empted Timmo’s OCB, meaning a new view of the wall is at his eye level, he simpers until his third martini has been set down upon his coaster, next to the S&L’s want ad for short order cooks. Moreover, when two pals congregate at Sourdough Bros, or when a sole companyman takes a 30-minute lunch break with a novella or educational manual about Sustainability, all will habitually choose the same seats as the time before and the time before that, because this is situation normal and hot desking isn’t, no matter how much futurists try to project that Activity Based Working or ABW, is the latest trend and a more productive method of 9-5ing. We’re only human after all.