New working habits, new tabletops
I pick up my mail in the coworking space where I haven’t worked since the beginning of 2020. There are new table tops. My landlord built most of the furniture in this coworking space himself from site timber.
This is what the table in the background (and the landlord in the foreground) looked like in 2015. You can’t see the dimensions of the tabletop here, but I think it’s two of the visible construction site boards. That would make the table about as deep as the two legs are wide in the middle, maybe a foot.
The landlord explains: We now need more space on the tables because many people no longer just open their laptops, but bring their own monitors with them.
The new work situation: Wooden laptop stand thing, separate second monitor, one of several air filter devices for Covid reasons. Only the lamp is still the same as in 2015.
In this view you can see another monitor, which probably belongs to the neighboring workstation. It is brought to an ergonomic height in the traditional way by a thick book from O’Reilly Verlag. In the foreground a mouse, several laptop power supplies and the monitor’s VGA connection, which surprised me. I last owned a flat panel display like this around 2008 and would have expected that they would have different connections by now. They probably have too, I assume it’s an old device.
The new desktops are only about four inches lower than the old ones, but that’s probably enough. The extra monitors aren’t brought to work every day, they belong to people who work here regularly. I don’t know whether they just stay on the tables overnight, which aren’t rented out permanently, but are intended to be used flexibly. I haven’t been there in a long time for that.
Every time I write this post, I hesitate whether I can really write “monitor”. In my mind, a monitor is still a clunky tube monitor. The word has such a built-in heaviness for me, it doesn’t want to go with the light, flat devices. In the days when you had to make it clear that you weren’t talking about a tube monitor, we said “flat display”. I’ve only been working on my laptop since 2008 (without a separate monitor) and therefore haven’t had a reason to talk about these things for a long time. To be on the safe side, I check the website of a large electronics store for current usage. The result is clear.
(Kathrin Passig)