A woman's desktop.

Yesterday, I had the rare honour of being invited by a senior manager, a woman, for a small tete-a-tete on a utility I had made. I promptly made myself available (like I had a choice). As I tried to purge the discomfort from my system, I looked around and I will try to give a description of her desk.

On one end, there is a stack of diaries. There is a sleek, leather bound one. Her name is embossed in excellent caligraphy on a shiny strip of metal. Directly below that is the standard company issue diary. Then there is a smaller personal diary beneath. Next to the diaries, is a box of Kleenex tissues. Invariably, one piece is sticking out the opening of the box, just like in the glossy ads.
There is a huge tin of milo and a small petri-dish like receptacle that holds a silver tea spoon. Silver. The metal. Not your bloody run-of-the-mill stainless steel. Down a few millimetres south, there is another tin of biscuits, imported. The name went something like "isolde" with those funny characters (èï), plus other characters that I cannot find on my keyboard.
Connoisseurs in strange European languages like Samborera can elaborate further.
There is a small jug of water, and the inevitable tall, thin glass, all elaborately engraved. The glass is somewhere between half to two-thirds full of water, which was too clear, even by water's standards and thus looked surreal.
Then there was this huge plastic "mug", for lack of a better word; The kind that americans favour for taking coffee during street jaunts; complete with a protruding mouth piece where one sticks their lips and sucks out the coffee. What is this thing called? Someone please educate me.

A tray follows next, with assorted papers, all neatly stacked together. Appropriately labelled folders peek out of the edges. Yellow and pink sticky note pads lie atop the papers in precise order, the distance from the pad corners to those of the tray unbelievably looking equal.
A miniaturized wooden "silo", with faces carved from the sides, holds a forest of garishly coloured pens of all shapes and sizes.

Ahhh...The heart of the matter. A gleaming, brand new Toshiba Tecra laptop. This little birdie comes with 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB HDD and a processor that runs at 3 GHz. Bluetooth, InfraRed and a TV card (like you can watch TV during office hours). The mouse is totally detached from the rest of the machine and is issuing a blue, psychedelic light. This will on occasion change to a bright, angry red if the mouse feels it has been inappropriately disturbed.

To the left of the machine is a potrait of a man, the woman and two obviously amply fed kids, all grinning incongrously. Glossy and colourful magazines (cosmopolitan et al) are by the photo.
Two cellphones, a Nokia 6230i and Sony Ericsson P900 are lying on the magazines. Also on the magazines is a black handbag which is the size of your ordinary textbook. A polythene bag, and certainly not the kind you buy to carry your fries in, is leaning on the handbag. The words "Woolsworth" are printed on the side. Yet another bag, made of sturdy polythene material (the look of the material defies simple description) and has white string straps is also present.

She effortlessly navigates the mind numbing maze of objects. She slips things into unbelievably small spaces; produces documents from huge stacks without thumbing through the whole thing. A cartographer can actually produce a map of this desk, complete with indexes.

A whole deal of animation is happening on the other desktop, the Toshiba Tecra one. Pictures of man, woman and two kids, in various states of grinning, against a variety of backgrounds, keep flashing by the screen in random order. The computer locks itself every five seconds. She unlocks it one second after that to reveal a desktop that has tooooo many documents for the small screen. No prizes for guessing that the static background has a picture of, yes, man, woman, two kids grinning. Its like a dark mime show.

In short order the meeting is over, since I never had anything to offer except to nod in agreement. I trudge back to my desk, quite relieved. Any area inhabited by HR people has this evil, haunted hang about it.I look at my desk in comparison. It is brutally bare and simple. To my right is a mouse, with the appropriate entrapments to the machine. In any random position on the desk you will find one pen, capless. There is a foolscap pad, with writings that do not follow any particular order, and neither are they complete or coherent. There is a flat monitor, pushed to the wall, the keyboard and system unit. A whole lot of wires running about and finally a deskphone.
My PC desktop is black. The only other icons that naturally don't come with Windows are: Winamp (2.8, and I have not recovered from being barred from using this program). Firefox (replaced IE),winzip and acrobat.Simplicity itself.

PS:
I am reliably told that offering our local variety of chocolates (read Dairy Milk) to a valentine, is a gaffe that only equals giving plastic flowers to a lady. Faux pas unparalleled. For chocolate to be worthy of her, it must first go through passport controls and board a plane from misty lands like the Netherlands, Denmark or Belgium. It must also be in wrapping that is more expensive than the chocolate itself by several orders of magnitude. In addition, it must not assume any of the more commonly known geometric shapes; No. A shape sculptor with the skill of a diamond cutter must be called in to carve the thing into a shape that gives the impression of love, affection or other feelings of a spoony (griiiiin) extraction. All this for something that will result in a formless mass once popped into the mouth.

Grand weekend people.