There was probably an entire year or two wherein we collectively outlawed the industrial desk from this very site. Too serious, too dark, too slice-of-life Pod Brooklyn. Then, surreptitiously, half the team got one anyway and now no one likes to say who was on which side of that conversation.
Mine and Joe’s is the kind you buy once and then shuffle all your furniture around your downstairs to accommodate it – no one tells you that part. It also doesn’t shift when you sneeze near it thanks to the industrial strength steel frame. This is either the selling point or deeply mildly horrific depending on which day you ask us. The desk survived a laptop being dropped on it from standing height twice now and yet still bears nothing but a scratch we can no longer find when we want to prove something to each other.
The reality of living with it on a daily basis isn’t quite as grand as the pictures make it.
The underside of it is cold to rest your arms on in January.
Cold like ice, the kind of cold where you sit up slightly straighter without realising you’re doing it.
One of us has a jumper draped over one corner at all times to counteract this very problem. We both know this sort of defeats the point slightly but what are you going to do.
The beef, if you want to call it that, isn’t about how sturdy or well built it is, it’s about surface area. One desk in this house has cradled a laptop, three now cold mugs of coffee, our plant that definitely shouldn’t be next to a laptop and at one point a full birthday cake; because it was the only flat surface in the entire house not underneath something else. It hasn’t complained about any of it. That, dear reader, is the real reason to buy one, not because it’s steel or looks like a Steve Jobs apartment but because it won’t judge you for balancing your entire life on top of it.
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Guilty pleasure ownership confession: Owning one of these makes you feel slightly guilty too, if we’re being honest.
It makes your house look a bit too put together for there to be a dog and a toddler with the world’s supply of felt tip pens running around.
It photographs like you have your shit together.
We do not, currently, have our shit together. We have three tabs open about spreadsheets and our plant is quietly dying in the corner that our desk shadows over.
What we will say has changed around these parts: No one argues about getting one anymore, simply which finish to get it in. Half the team wants to keep it raw and “authentic” with the welds proudly on display. The rest of us want to have it powder coated until it begs for mercy because rubbing against your jumper doesn’t cause sweat stains. We’ll both pretend to argue about this forever and neither of us believes it’ll ever be resolved.
If we had it to do over again, we’d get one tomorrow. Deskinesque arms and all. And honestly we’ll probably just get it in the finish we both complain about. Moral victories aren’t really our thing… but there it is.
