Desk hygiene: Middle-class problems

No. 128: In the modern office, how does one deal with a desk's upkeep?

Once, your desk was your domain, a place where you could indulge your passion for peanut brittle or manifest your OCD tendencies to your heart's content.

Nestled among the pads of your keyboard might lie anything from biscuits to dried yoghurt, while the outlying regions were filled with teetering towers of paperwork and unopened post that harboured armies of bacteria.

But in the modern office, where hot-desking, desk-sharing, and freelancing mean that your desk is now public property, how does one deal with its upkeep?

By keeping antibacterial spray next to one's screen, on which sits a Post-it with a jaunty “Sorry! Had a bit of an accident with the sushi, so you might find the odd rice grain knocking about”?

Or by devoting 20 minutes at the end of every Thursday to scrupulously scrubbing down and clearing all surfaces and drawers in the hope that the slob who sits at your desk on Friday will get the message and follow your example, even though for the past four years all they've left you with on Monday is a pile of apple cores, dirty crockery and unwanted receipts?

More forward-thinking employers attempt solutions such as desk-hygiene monitors, threats of pile annihilation and matching up new employees with existing ones whose desks they think suits their personality. But these are all doomed to fail, because in these hard times of job insecurity, zero-hours contracts and hungry, keen interns snapping at old-timers' heels, no one can be seen to have the time to occasionally clear their desk – for fear of being asked to clear it permanently.