I have something to say.
I hate my desk. There. I’ve said it. Let the healing begin.
We have this great big computer desk. Wheels, cupboard, adjustable shelves, file drawer, CD rack, monitor plinth, slide-out keyboard drawer.. Cost us over $500.00, six years ago. I hate it.
I chose it, which is what makes it worse. See, when we got it, it seemed like a great idea. All sorts of storage nooks, nice and solid.
We ran into problems early on though. It’s got a nook for the PC, but extremely poor access for the cables to get to the PC. The plinth was a great design for the 19″ CRT I had. I just replaced it with a 19″ LCD. It just doesn’t look right. If I sit it close to the front of the (angled!) plinth, it looks strange, if I line it up correctly, everything is just… wrong.
You can’t sit in front of it straight on, because of the design of the desk. The foot-cubbyhole-thing is centred. The plinth is at the left-hand side of the desk. Just nothing lines up right. I’m too far from the monitor to do detailed work in Illustrator. Yes, that’s right. I’m actually blaming the desk for the lack of updates to my comic strip.
I’ve tried putting the keyboard and mouse on the top surface of the desk, as the keyboard drawer always feels like it’s about to snap off. Unfortunately, there’s a ridge around the edge of the desk. Adding insult to injury, the top of the desk is too high to work at, even without the ridge.
The nooks? The design of the plinth pretty much makes the space underneath too deep to be useful. Sure, it fits my Mac mini, KVM, USB hub and network switch underneath, but they’re all too far back underneath to be easily accessible. The cupboard is a bit too small to be useful for anything except storing junk. The CD rack is mostly left unused because of the sheer number of CDs I have, and the number of those that aren’t in your traditional CD jewel case (I bought a set of shelves. Ironically, pretty much the same problem with them). The adjustable shelves are too small to store anything useful (also replaced with a set of bookshelves). The file drawer? It’s got this weird half-inch gap at the front of the file runners which means that the files at the front fall off the runners.
I’ve been trying to find a new desk to replace it, but I have a limited budget (particularly given that I spend part of it on a new keyboard, mouse and KVM). I need to hire a trailer and try and find an ex-government warehouse somewhere here in Melbourne.
It’s like bad desk feng shui or something. I have a serious amount of trouble getting anything useful done at this desk.
Or maybe I’m just blaming my tools.