Girl About Globe | The desk grab: office colonialism

Linda Kennedy

There’s a lot to swallow in a modern office. Rage when logged out of a hot-desk. And Marks and Spencer miniature food in buckets.

I don’t spend much time in offices. Never have done. Usually I’ve been an on-the-road TV correspondent or a columnist, which is a job by statute done in pyjamas. Recently this has changed, with my spending a couple of days a week down the corporate salt mines. (Or up the corporate salt mines, given most Hong Kong offices are in towers.)

This office stint is raising a philosophical question about hot-desking. Do you log other people out of computers and take a desk?  Did Descartes ever write about hot-desking? Did Kant? The desk doctrine. Log-on logic.

The empirical experience happens when I am out filming. Upon return, there’s a person at my elected hot-desk and my notepad, pen, and newspaper have been shunted aside. I hover, somewhat baffled, and hear a mutter the raider had to check something on a database and a subsequent mutter that he will move. He doesn’t.

Sometimes this guy sits at the desk, sometimes I do. Evidently he wants to make it ‘his desk’, that grey area of hot-desking when a person seeks to establish seigneurial (sign-on-eurial?) rights over a computer.

There were different desks free, but he is marking his office turf.

I repair to another seat, which turns out to have fun neighbours: a nice dividend of my enforced migration. Nonetheless, the desk grab offends me. I feel displaced. Ousted. I finally begin to understand how the Chinese mainland felt about Hong Kong. Seizing someone’s desk and logging on is a small-scale office version of colonialism.

What to do longer term? How to get my handover? Come in early -it would amuse me to do that on July 1 –  retake the desk but endure sullen retaliation? This at least means I am standing up for my gender because, honestly, no woman would have logged someone out of a computer and taken a desk. We don’t start wars over territory.

Whilst pondering, I snack. This raises another office issue relating to bums on seats; this time size not location. There was a study earlier in the year saying office snacks make you fat. I am seeing this potential.

Marks and Spencer are the tidbits culprits. They do buckets of mini snacks. Mini teacakes, mini granola bites covered in yoghurt, mini chocolate-drizzled cornflake bites, mini flapjacks, mini Swiss rolls. All in plastic pails which mean the snack table has more buckets than a seaside 7-11.

M&S doesn’t brand these ‘office snacks’ but they should, targeting Sunday late afternoon shoppers with a banner over the buckets: ‘BACK TO WORK DEALS. TWO BUCKETS FOR HK$88.’

From my distant hot-desk, I also enjoy the protocol of office snacks. Dainties. Itsy bitsy bites. Trifling but not trifle. No spoons, please. It has to be a mouthful, no bigger.

The packaging may not rustle– too much cardboard commotion or unwrapping fanfare and the regularity of your stops at the snack table will become office gossip. Snack silently. Marks & Spencer’s buckets pass all of these tests: press on lid; 50 calories per snack; morsel-approved.

I speculate about asking the desk-grabber if he’d like to write his bucket list. The cover: I’m inquiring about his preferred mini-snacks. The reality: to sound mini-menacing.

Still, perhaps it’s for the best. The desk being fought over is by the buckets. Better to sit elsewhere, than munch on mini-everything all day? Fewer calories. Alternatively, I will just hope it doesn’t happen again. After all, the era of colonialism is over.