The Cuckoo

I need to preface this entry with a few details about my workspace preferences. For many years I "worked" for Dante's Nine Circles of Hell and for most of that penance I did not have an allocated desk at my designated workplace. Instead I used the nearest vacant "hot desk" whenever I needed to pop in to the office. This approach has many benefits for an employer. It is far cheaper than providing desk space for the entire workforce and is perfect for a flexible, mobile workforce. It also, by definition, re-enforces a "clear desk policy" ... After all who is going to bother putting up photos of loved ones and pets, arrange boxes of tissues, mount clipframed Industry Qualification certificates and stick Gonks across the top of a monitor only to have to remove them at the end of the working day.*

So to summarise; I have been used to sitting at a spartan workspace and leaving it clear of any belongings or paperwork at the end of the working day. To be honest I like the absence of clutter ... I guess it suits the minimalist side of my personality.

Here at the Neat & Tidy Piano Movers things are different. I am free to work from home but I also have an allocated desk at an office a few miles down the road. I spend most of my time in my home office and tend to pop in to the proper office once a week. My desk at work reflects my ingrained habits and has the necessary tools but exhibits very little personalisation. There is a docking station for my laptop, a secondary screen, an IP phone, my trackball mouse, a Land Rover Mug and a teaspoon ...Oh, I forgot that it also has a small monotone image of my avatar taped to the divider that separates me from the adjacent workstation.

However I need to be clear that it is MY DESK and other inhabitants of the office space are well aware of this. They sit at their desks, I sit at mine. There are, I should mention, a number of vacant/unallocated desks in the area where I sit

So why is it that recently a chap has started to sit at my desk when I am not there? I first noticed this a few weeks back when I went to log on to my 'phone and noticed that the login screen showed someone elses logon details. It didnt take a rocket scientist to work it out and 30% confirmed that the "cuckoo" was starting to use my desk on a regular basis.

A couple of weeks ago I turned up at work and actually found the cheeky fucker sat in my seat. I am guessing that he could tell I wasnt impressed by the way I dumped my laptop bag alongside him and asked him to move while I had a quick chat with a colleague about a project. When I returned he had moved to one of the nearby vacant desks and, instead of offering an apology, advised that he rather liked the wide secondary screen that I have connected to my docking station.
Basically this cuckoo has an allocated desk in another part of the office but instead of using that he sits in my chair at my desk, using my equipment because he likes my shiny, secondary monitor. For some reason this really fucks me off!

I am guessing that I must be getting a bit territorial in my old age and he better fucking watch it because if he doesn't sod off back to his own desk he could well find me scent marking my desk and the environs in an attempt to keep him off my patch.

Although scent marking** my desk space was tempting I have decided that I actually quite like Piano Moving and would like to remain employed. I therefore decided to employ some slightly more sophisticated tactics to secure my patch. My first was quite simple ... I took a biro and penned the words "bad man's desk" at the bottom of the monotone print of my avatar that is pinned to the desk divider.

I then heard a conversation that suggested that the cuckoo might have OCD tendencies as he avoids touching hand rails on stairs "because of the germs". Bingo! When I left the office yesterday I ensured that my coffee mug remained unwashed and was stategically placed in the middle of the desk. I also positioned a minging teaspoon between the QWERTY and ASDF rows of my keyboard.

Surprise, surprise; when I walked in to work today my desk was vacant and the cuckoo was sat opposite me. Perhaps he has finally got the message.

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* Anyone who thinks it is to prevent industrial espionage is deluded
** Think Hippopotamus spraying it's excrement at the edge of the Great Congo River