2 Workers, 1 Desk: The Battle Royale
When both partners are working from home because of the pandemic, is it a blessing or a curse?
You might be disappointed by the slightly clickbait-y title, as (spoiler alert) this post does absolutely not contain any X-rated material. However, I feel like the issue at hand hasn’t been addressed much on Medium or even amongst my peers, making me wonder if I’m the only one in this situation?
I have had a hard time following the different lockdown situations in other countries since Covid-19 took people’s work from their offices and into their homes, and which parts of the world are currently in partial or total confinement, or not at all. Here in France, the lockdown lasted from mid-March until Mid-May, and since then, people who work in offices gradually came back to work. Sometimes full week, sometimes a few times a week, or not at all yet.
Enters our current situation with my partner and I. We have the privilege that both our companies haven’t reopened their doors since the first initial lockdown in March 2020, and we’ve been both working from home, full time.
Both.
Now let me first start by a disclaimer: as I see my friends and relatives being forced to come back to the office full-week, wearing masks at their desks and worrying about “contact cases” as a new Covid case appears amongst their colleagues pretty much every week, I feel for their complex situation and worry about their health. On that, I have no complaints about staying safely at home while still having a full time job and the salary that goes with it.
However.
When the working from home policy started in our respective companies, we had no idea, they had no idea that it was about to last for as long as we could foresee in 2020. Unprepared, and with my company which used historically to NOT allow any work from home arrangements, my partner and I complied and went one last time to our respective offices to get our laptops before lockdown.
But at home, we only have one desk.
ONE desk, and it’s starting to drive me crazy.
So related to that, here are the 3 reasons why being BOTH working from home is NOT all unicorns and rainbows:
1. Endless one-sided calls
Sometimes (ok, most of the time which is approximately half of the working day, five days a week), I feel like I’m stuck on a forever train with an obnoxious passenger who’s having hour-long conversations on his phone. As it’s been proven that when out in public, we are disconcerted by people being on the phone largely because we can hear only one half of the conversation — we don’t hear what is being said on the other side, so the conversation is cut in half and our ever-curious brain can neither completely obliterate the sound, nor can it reconstitute the whole thing, trying to fill in the missing pieces. Which is frustrating. All the more so when your partner’s calendar is full of Zoom meetings, while thank goodness I only currently have but a few a week. Not that when we do, it gets any easier, because:
2. I need a freaking desk!
Enters when we both have a call. Oh the cacophony. My partner would never admit to it, but I feel like there’s this silent war of who’s going to call dibs on the desk area, and benefit from sitting at the desk and have a proper office chair to conduct said meeting. Sure, at least we’re not in the same room and I cannot say that our apartment is small — at least by French standards, but still ! We finished furnishing our home a few months before Covid hit, and obviously didn’t think we would ever need two desks back in “those days”.
Since I have fewer meetings, I guess he wins 90% of the time while I’m sitting on the couch, laptop on my, well, lap, or working from the kitchen table. The kitchen table! That’s sustainable for a few weeks or months, sure, but if we’d known we’d be doing this for the whole year and maybe even further in 2021, I swear I would have built a womancave, be it in the basement, and bring internet in there and a heater from day one.
Not only that, but I just simply like being at my desk. MY desk. Be it at work or at home, my desk is my environment, with my decoration, my personal belongings and my scattered papers where I can decide WHEN or IF I’m going to sort them out. Moving in, when we went for one desk/two people, I wasn’t already very keen on the idea but something’s had to give and my partner didn’t feel so strong about needing his own personal desk — or needing one at all, which made the one desk we had kind of automatically, or at least in my head, mine for the vast majority. Now? I’m a castaway on a stranded couch-office island whose back is hurting and whose head is buzzing from the simultaneous call-double-downs.
3. I need free access to my desktop PC
This one isn’t directly related to Covid, but I swear now is the perfect time to blame everything on that damn pandemic, so this is what I’m about to do (*shakes fists at sky). What happens when a couple of gamers have a kid and decide/are forced to cut down on gaming? Surely, no need for a desktop PC at all! That sh** belongs to the past! Or so my partner thought, but me? I need my gaming time alright, be it one hour when our daughter is asleep — but I also need it to work on my website, tinker on Photoshop or Illustrator, watch a Youtube video in 1080p, you get it, I NEED my PC, but can you guess where is the one PC we have? On the aforementioned desk!! And truly, my partner doesn’t even use it except for the screen to double with his laptop during those cursed Zoom meetings. I know it’s petty as hell but I did not plan on having tiny scheduled time windows on when and how I should access our PC, when I’m already stuck at home all day, so close to the promised desk!
Where do we go from here?
Now don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for still having a job, not being forced to return to the office and I cannot ever imagine going back to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and hope most companies all over the world will take the hint and allow several days of working from home, even after the pandemic is (hopefully) over. However, we were not prepared for being two full-time remote workers, and what we gained in personal comfort (no more deliveries missed, and anything from doctor appointments, laundry or errands time can be much better accommodated), we have lost in actual material comfort in our working conditions. This is why you’ll find me browsing nowadays to find a 50x60 cm tiny table that would fit in the corner of the hallway, where maybe I’ll be able to put one small organizer and a little stack of personal papers if I squeeze them in somehow. Wish me luck!
