Musical Chairs
Welcome to London — Episode 12
London. Monday. 8.30 am. I climb the last set of stairs where the lift doesn’t reach our office any more and walk over to my desk by the window. My desk is clearly mine — the pens tidily set next to the paper, stickers from my teams pinned to the wall behind the monitors, the mouse left of my German keyboard.
At this time of the day, only a few places are filled. However, when I approach my bank I can see a tuft of hair beyond my monitor. Wrinkling my forehead I come closer to see the face belonging to this fluffy hair.
A guy sits on my desk. My keyboard is gone only the Rhino sticker proves that only a team member should sit here.
“Hi, good morning,” I start, instead of shouting ‘what are you doing here?’.
The desk thief briefly looks up and greets me back. Obviously not embarrassed by his mistake.
I stand there and wait. No reaction. Eventually, he looks up, “Can I help you?”
‘Yes, move your but’ flashes through my brain but I pronounce: “Actually, that is my desk — Hence the keyboard and everything.”
“Keyboard?” he asks genuinely surprised. “I thought this floor does hot-desk as well.”
Now I am the one being surprised. Hot-desking. We are developers — we need a steady and stable environment. Why would anyone do something so cruel like changing the seat every morning?
I shake my head. “You cannot sit here. All of the Rhinos sit in these two rows of desks.”
“The Rhinos?”
“My team — the point is, these desks are assigned,” I start to get annoyed and drop my bag on the table. And yet I have to find out what happened to my keyboard!
The intruder, however, doesn’t even blink. His attention gets back to his emails.
“Sorry, but our team got sent up to the sixteenth floor and there is no sign or anything that I can’t sit here. I’ll find another seat tomorrow, but — first come first serve, mate.”
I am not your mate, pal — never mind. I would not give up that easily, but there is only so much I can do for now.
Shaking with rage I walk around the desks and grab a chair. I can hardly just take someone else’s spot now, so I wait for my laptop to start and bring up my calendar, to find out who is working from home today and therefore abandon his seat.
While I am sitting on the wrong side of the desk, Tony arrives in the office. The face in his phone he only sees me when he already reaches out for the chair, which I sheepishly took.
Baffled he takes out his headphones.
“Forget about it, Dengler — why are you sitting on my desk!”
So, it is not only me!
Without a word, I point to my seat where he can spot the forehead of the invader.
Tony’s frown deepens. “Who are you?” — did I mention that we are not the most sociable people in the world?
Hot-desk-guy introduces himself hesitantly as a team member from one of the lower floors. They all got moved up to the sixteenth floor, as they were running out of desks — dah, every floor is stuffed with people.
Hot-desking is part of the FineTech culture. And it works out well. Most people spend their time with meetings, at client-site or working from home, so the few hours or couple of days they need a spot they just grab their laptop and sit somewhere. So the company exaggerates the capacity to 150 or even 180 per cent on every floor.
Surely someone saw the numbers on our floor and thought, hey there are only ten more people than desks, we can easily ram another thirty in that office. What could possibly go wrong?
But if you haven’t noticed, yet, we are different in every way. We never — never — work on client-site. We barely ever leave our floor, to be honest. And only ever a few people work from home as we need to work together closely, even if that means to shout through the entire room if I managed to screw up my code base again.
For us, “hot-desking” means musical chairs, where the last person to come into the office is the one sitting in the breakout area on the couch. No second monitor, nowhere close to the immediate team members. Call us spoiled, but it is impossible to code on a 15'’ laptop screen.
Fiercely I slap the lid of my laptop shut. “Charlie is working from home today. I’ll sit there for the time being.”
With a deadly look, I walk across the room and seat myself at Charlie’s desk. I don’t dare to change any of the setups, though, I can’t get comfortable for the entire day. On top of that, my keyboard is missing — however, my laptop is set to German, so none of the keys on the English keyboard of the laptop itself is doing what they say.
The office fills with my team members and the new team equally and everywhere is confusion. We end up filling the big meeting room with people and a bunch sitting on the rather uncomfortable cocktail chairs at our high table for the morning stand-up.
Whoever thought, the devs up in the sixteenth floor have space to spare was terribly wrong.
Before lunch I go downstairs to find our facility manager, also known as a posh janitor, to find out, what happened to my keyboard.
He tells me that IT collected all devices on the desks and he collected everything else lying around in the office, as we all know there is a clean desk policy. My blood pressure is beyond 180 by that time already and I need only one more name: Who seated the second team on our floor?
Time to get some back-up.
With a detour to the fifth floor in the chamber of secrets to the IT guys, where I finally get my keyboard back, I return to my office to grab my manager, Chris.
I find him in the breakout area on the couch. But he isn’t in an early lunch break, but with his computer on his lap the mouse next to him sunk between the cushions trying to scribble something on a post-it placed on his thigh with the result of poking holes into the paper and ruining his trousers with black ink.
When I see him I know immediately I got an ally.
“Chris, Dallas moved the other team out of his office, up to ours. We have to get rid of them again.”
“Say no more,” Chris’s face is all red with fury and he grabs his laptop and jumps up — regardless of the post-it and pens on his lap which fall to the floor with a soft clink and escapes under the couch, lost forever.
On our march down to Dallas, the others turn their head. We must look like a band of crusaders, determined to our quest.
“Where are you going?” Tony shouts from his desk when we pass by.
“To put an end to this madness,” I reply with a clenched fist in the air.
Wordlessly he jumps up from his seat and follows us downstairs.
On our way, we pick up more tormented seat-less colleagues so that we are a raging mob by the time we reach Dallas.
His complacent smile fades the minute he sees us raving towards him. By the look on his face, you would believe we brought forks and lit the torches.
Sunk in his seat he is very compliant to our suggestions and by the end of the day, we have the sixteenth floor to ourselves again.
What we do as soon as we hit the critical mass when we are more people than we have space up there is for another day.
To Management— May the day never come that you make us do hot-desk with another team.
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