We get crankier and pickier as we get older. It doesn’t help that I was eating my Halo oranges, taking my vitamins, eating some apples and knocking back orange juice yet still caught the creeping crude family members were passing around. I have had the big red monster for nearly two if not two decades now. There was a time when I enjoyed it immensely. Lately it hasn’t really fit my coding and writing style. Part of it seems to be keyboard height issue, but the major part is needing to be able to rotate it. You see, that piece connecting the front to the back can only go on that side. In order for me to turn the desk so the windows were to my back I would need to leave the open side a good 3 feet from the wall, consuming even more of my office. Besides, one of these days I will finally finish restoring that house I want to restore and I’m not certain this will fit. Been a few years since I measured it.
What I long for now is the best computer desk I will never have again. I can’t even find a picture of it so you can see what was so wonderful. I was a starving college student who made the mistake of attending the scam of Devry. I bought this 3-piece computer desk. It had this wide computer desk with adjustable overhead shelf, a tiny little corner piece and a massive printer stand with adjustable shelf and drawer. Yes, it had the slot cut through the top because it was all tractor fed dot matrix then. I believe it was made by O’Sullivan.
Yes, it was all glue and sawdust with a nice looking veneer, but it had one feature I miss immensely now. The entire width of the desk had a roll out feature. Half of the roll out was a keyboard tray wide enough for keyboards of the full sized DIN era. The other half was raised about 3-4 inches to provide both a solid writing/mousing surface and it had a wide pull out drawer under that. I used to keep piles of lead sheet scratch paper in there. The roll-out section effectively doubled your work area at a time when we had massive tube type monitors.
Maybe, if you are a laptop only person you can get by with one of those tiny computer desks they sell, but I’m a multiple monitor kind of guy. I only use laptops and netbooks when I’m traveling. Even when writing something as small as this blog post it is difficult for me to work with a single monitor. My work flow is such that I save my links, etc. in an editor over in the other window. Most of my clients tend to set up at least 2 and in many case 3 monitor systems for developers.
The closest thing I have found is this ashwood compact desk but it is too small. No, I simply can’t ask O’Sullivan because they don’t exist anymore. It has lead to some rather desperate pleas from people who ended up buying some liquidation items cheap only to find no assembly instructions.
Classic wooden work desks used to have these little trays one could pull out on either side. Usually you had to pull the drawer out with them to provide support if you were writing on them, but, they too expanded your work space.
Once you get past your gigantic desk days, you will harken back for something a bit more functional. Do I actually use all of this space? Yes. Most of it. The desk isn’t always piled with stuff, just most of the time. Why? I get that trait from my father. You should see the trash heap we call the tool shed. Thankfully we mostly kept him out of the two newer sheds.