An office worker has described an unexpected and frustrating discovery at their workplace after finding that the desk they had used daily for two years had effectively been “stolen”—despite the company’s strict hot‑desking policy.
The post, shared by u/purplereuben in the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit, is titled: “My usual desk has been ‘stolen’ and there is nothing I can do” and has received 16,000 upvotes since it was posted on January 22.
The viral post comes amid research that suggests workplace frustrations around respect, boundaries, and unspoken hierarchies are far from uncommon.
An August 2024 Monster study found that 31 percent of workers “don’t feel that their workplace is a respectful environment where manners are valued.”
The same survey revealed that 69 percent of employees “would consider leaving their job if their employer did not have policies in place around workplace etiquette.”
According to the Reddit poster, their company requires employees to fully clear desks at the end of each day, offering caddies and lockers for personal storage. In practice, however, there are more desks than employees, meaning most people—including the poster—tend to sit in the same spot out of routine and comfort.
“I work in an office with a hot-desking policy,” the worker wrote. “We are required to clear our desks completely at the end of each day… So pretty much everyone sits at the same desk every day. Including me.” They explained that the consistency was crucial for ergonomic reasons: adjusting seat height, desk height, and screen positioning daily caused neck and shoulder strain.
After two years at the same workstation, everything changed “a few days ago,” when the worker arrived to find belongings that weren’t theirs placed on the desk. “Surprising, but not a problem—if someone arrived before me, they are perfectly entitled to take that desk,” the Redditor wrote. But the other person had not arrived first.
“Except they didn’t arrive before me,” the poster said. “They left their belongings on the desk overnight and sauntered in one hour after me.” The pattern repeated the next day: their things were already on the desk, yet the person was nowhere in sight until later in the morning. By leaving items overnight—something explicitly prohibited under the clear‑desk policy—the newcomer had effectively claimed the workspace permanently.
Matters grew more complicated when the poster realized that the person now occupying the desk was a manager. Not their direct manager, but one with a reputation for being “a bit difficult to deal with.”
“They are the kind of person that if I asked someone else what to do they’d say ‘Oh it’s her?…. yeah I think it’s best you let that one go,’” they said. Because of this, the poster felt unable to challenge the situation, despite policy being on their side. As a result, they now have to relocate to another desk further from their team, while the manager sits among people they don’t directly work with.
“So that’s it,” the poster concluded. “I have to find another desk further away from the people I actually work with while she sits next to a bunch of people she doesn’t work directly with at all. Grr.”
Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via the Reddit messaging system.
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