COVID sent everyone home. For the first time in my working life, I had to think about where I worked. Not just when or how, but where. The options were not inspiring. The kitchen table. The couch. The bed, which was already occupied and not entirely available.
I gave it about a week. Then I made a decision. If I was going to work from home, I was going to work properly. I spent around three hundred dollars. A chair. A small plastic table. And a monitor that connected to my laptop.
Suddenly I had two screens. The laptop for sharing my screen on calls, the monitor for everything I actually needed to work on. I could present from the laptop while working quietly on the monitor. Documents, spreadsheets, notes, all visible to me while the call saw only what I wanted them to see. I became the person people asked to share their screen because I had the setup to do it cleanly.
Three hundred dollars changed how I worked every day.
A colleague of mine was struggling. Capable person, responsible, good at his job. But every time he had to share his screen on a call it became an ordeal. He had multiple windows open across different applications. He would share one and the moment the conversation moved to data sitting somewhere else, he had to stop the share, navigate to the other application, and start sharing again. Every switch was a small interruption. Every interruption broke the flow of the conversation. It was painful to watch because the solution was so simple.
I suggested he get a monitor. I told him it would make his life easier. I meant it genuinely. I had seen what it did for me and I thought he would see the same.
He told me the organisation should buy it for him.
I thought about pushing back. I thought about saying that the money was not very much for something that would make every working day better. I thought about making the case more strongly.
But I looked at how certain he was. How completely settled he was in his position. And I let it go.
Some people see a small problem and fix it. Some people see a small problem and wait for someone else to fix it. I do not think either group fully understands the other.
My colleague never got the monitor. I do not know if he ever struggled less.
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