Ope Pardon, No. 7: Nesting

A couple years ago, before the pandemic took a sledgehammer to our preconceived notions about office work and reasonable accommodations of all kinds, I read an article about how open floor plans were Actually Bad. Another false promise Silicon Valley had conned the rest of the world into, despite the fact whatever benefits it might have had for the tech industry were largely inapplicable and frequently counterproductive for most other industries. At the time, I was working in an open floor plan office that was being hit very hard by the model's downsides. Bad apple(s) spoiling the whole barrel-type shit.

However, the open floor plan itself is not, in theory, my enemy. I can choose when to go into the office and when to work remotely. On the days I really need to concentrate, the days when social chatter is an active hindrance to productivity, I simply do not go in. Being as it is then that my primary reason for ever being in the office at all is to be available for two-hour lunch and/or happy hour invites, the open floor plan actually works in my favor. (I also believe that for most people, the alternative to open floor plan is not offices with doors for everyone, but cubicles and cubicles are worse because they are just an open floor plan with the illusion of privacy. You still can't take a personal phone call, but now you have to stand up if you want to talk to your neighbor.) What doesn't work for me is the open floor plan's corollary trend, hot desking.

Hot desking is an office organizational system in which no one has an assigned desk and anyone can theoretically sit anywhere at any time. It has been around long enough that I thought it had already fallen out of fashion when my boss told me it was the policy in place at my new office. My company has proper offices in Lyon, but works out of a WeWork in Paris. We have what I guess is like the middle-tier WeWork offering: We don't have a full floor or even wing to ourselves, but we do have a nice private corner space with our name on the door and enough desks for maybe 15-20 people to work comfortably and a large screen and some storage. In other words, enough space that everyone could have their own desk and still leave open seats for when folks were in from Lyon or wherever.

I understand the logic of hot desking. With a 100% flexible work schedule, different people come in on different days at different times and it doesn't make sense to restrict who sits where, especially if everyone is bringing their stuff in and out of the office every day anyway. But this logic is built, to me, on faulty foundations. As anyone who has ever done anything with open seating can tell you, just because desks aren't assigned doesn't mean that people don't have "their" desks by the end of week one. My sample size is small, but a lot of people in my office definitely sit in the same spot every day. I myself sat at the same desk every day (mostly because it's well-placed for lunch invites, even if the desk itself is a little wobbly). Yet even with this semi-permanence in progress, I take umbrage with the fact that I cannot make this desk my own.

For starters, there are things that would just be easier for me to leave at my desk. Yes, I will bring my work laptop and notebooks back and forth regardless of where I work, but I have so many pens that I can comfortably leave a mug of pens at my desk and still have pens when I work remotely. I don't need to carry those back and forth. I also have two water tumblers and it would be nice to leave one at the office so I can drink unhinged amounts of water and stop giving myself migraines from the 1000 coffee breaks I am now culturally mandated to take. I have a Mac charger at home so there's no reason for me to carry one to and fro. With how I work when I work from home, I also do not need my portable mouse or keyboard unless I want to download French Mavis Beacon so I can actually learn to type on it.

Basically, even with the understanding that on Mondays and Fridays and possibly Wednesdays I will need my work stuff at home, there is a considerable amount of shit I do not need to be lugging back and forth every day. Not to mention things I simply like to do, like covering my monitor in Post-It notes. (Before anyone launches into problem-solving mode: Yes, I am sure I could just ask about leaving stuff in one of the cabinets that locks and if, on the off chance someone is at "my" desk when I get there, I could simply ask them to let me grab my stuff, at which point if they are anything like me, they will be the one feeling bad for sitting in "my" desk when of course no such real designation exists and no one should feel bad about any of this even though I inevitably will because finding ways to feel bad about things I shouldn't feel bad about is my number one hobby.)

In any case, what my frustration with hot desking has underscored is not just that I need to start using a backpack before my chiropractor yells at me, but that I really, truly am a nester. I like to make a house a home. Or a desk a home, as it were. 

I was in someone’s apartment the other day, a grown man’s and before you ask yes he was, and if I may be hyperbolic it was about as hospitable as a jail cell. It also didn't look like this was a personal stylistic choice — that everything was discretely hidden and the vibe he was going for was Kardashian-West meets Black Mirror chic. Which isn't my taste and is possibly a massive red flag but at least says something about the person who lives there. The apartment just seemed devoid of personality and it made me kind of sad.

I don't think I could be happy living somewhere that absent of my self. Maybe it's just vanity that I like to surround myself with things that remind myself of me or that I like my own company so much I enjoy its presence in inanimate objects. Because I couldn’t tell you exactly what items I have in my apartment that he didn't — I've recently killed my only plant and all my art is still in the U.S. so it's not art or plants. I think it might just be something I am going to call constructive clutter.

Constructive clutter is, to be clear, first and foremost still clutter. (I am workshopping the operative adjective, but I enjoy alliteration so we're going with "constructive" for now.) It can be understood as stuff that spends most of its time out of place (or never really having a place) when its place should, in fact, be out of sight in a drawer (or in a trash can), but it's the kind of the stuff that also makes a home (or desk) feel lived in. My constructive clutter tends to be mugs, notebooks, books, Post-Its, pens, sweaters, hand lotion and dog treats. These things are scattered across every surface in my apartment and, together or separtely, give you a pretty accurate picture of who I am.

When I was apartment hunting, I was looking for furnished apartments because I did not have the emotional, mental or financial capacity to furnish a full apartment from scratch last spring, but I quickly realized that I wanted the most minimal furnishing options possible. I wanted a bed and an "equipped" kitchen, but I didn't want to rent a place whose shelves were already full of knick-knacks, books and art where the photographs may or may not have come with the frame. I wanted — and found! — a place that I could functionally live in the day I moved in, but I could also make my own when I, slowly but surely, accumulated new French clutter and/or brought my old clutter over from the U.S. (Yes, I have made peace with the fact I am someone who might pay to ship what any reasonable person would call trash.)

For the most part, I've succeeded in cluttering up the place. I'm still missing things — namely my books and records — that would truly make my apartment feel like the homes I made in the U.S., but I also feel like I have very much nested in my apartment here. I feel at home not only in Paris but specifically in the 23-square-meters I share with a 25-kilo dog. As much as I have the address history of someone with overactive wanderlust, having somewhere that feels like home and grounds me to me is important to me and helps me settle into somewhere new.

Furthermore, in an office or new job context, I think I find it easier to introduce myself or convey my personality through a lightly decorated desk than two-truths-and-a-lie ice breakers. To wit, someone has already commented on the fact I have three separate note pads on my desk and does anyone need that many notebooks and I do feel like he now knows me a little bit better because of that observation. Through a little bit of inexplicable accumulation and a little bit of intentional action, my desks, like my apartments, have always become covered in the constructive clutter that tells you who I am. So it makes me a little sad that, because of "hot desking" or whatever, I won't get that to do that here.

But in any case, my new coworkers are obscenely nice and welcoming, so I suppose I could try talking to them instead of complaining about a lack of desk debris, but where is the fun in that?