There is a running joke in the office about the person who still uses a coaster on an oak desk that has already survived a flooded radiator, a dog with a growth spurt, and a laptop charger left plugged in overnight that melted a small crater into a different desk entirely two flats ago. She brings her own coaster. To a desk that has visibly endured worse than a mug ring could ever manage. We bring it up constantly and she ignores us constantly, which is its own kind of harmony.
That’s really the whole appeal of oak as a desk, though, the fact that it takes the abuse and just gets more interesting looking for it. We’ve got desks in this collective with ring stains, a scorch mark from a candle nobody will own up to, and one with a groove worn into the front edge from someone resting their wrist there for what must be four years running. None of it looks like damage exactly.
It looks like a desk that’s been used, which is more than you can say for the pale flat pack one that got binned after eight months because it swelled up the second a glass of water so much as looked at it.
We don’t agree on the weight of the thing, if we’re honest.
Some of us love that you need two people and a moment of reflection to move it, because it means the desk stays where it’s put and stops migrating round the room every time someone reorganises their life.
Others have moved house with one strapped to a trolley up three flights of stairs and have Opinions about that now, Opinions they raise unprompted, often mid conversation about something entirely unrelated.
You Might Also Like
Nobody’s precious about the surface either, which is sort of the whole point of the title, and also the source of most of the office bickering.
Cables get gaffer taped to the underside. Plants get put down without a saucer and nobody remembers until there’s a tide mark. A toddler got hold of a purple crayon and did something genuinely impressive to one corner that the desk’s owner has, controversially, decided to keep rather than sand out, on the grounds that it’s “provenance now.” Half of us think that’s a lovely way of looking at it.
The other half think it’s just a purple crayon mark and she’s being sentimental about a filing surface.
What we keep coming back to is that oak doesn’t ask you to treat it gently, it asks you to actually use it, badly if necessary, for years, and it comes out the other side looking more like itself rather than less.
The coaster woman would disagree, probably, given the chance. She has not been given the chance. We’ve hidden the coaster twice now and she’s bought a third one, which honestly might be the most honest verdict on the whole desk that any of us has managed yet.
