I recently moved desks within our offices here in New York City. I now sit directly across from my boss, Anya Strzemien. With this move I discovered that we have a few things in common...namely, our shoe hoarding habits. We both store a lot of footwear under our desks.
Like my home, I consider my desk at work to be my private space, and barring disturbing my neighbors, I arrange it how I please. I'm a pretty tidy person, so I like to keep my desk neat, but underneath my workspace is another story.
I'm a high-heels-at-work kinda gal, but teetering to and from the office is no longer an option. I used to schlep my heels to work in my purse, until I had a realization. Firstly, it is too expensive and time-consuming to visit the chiropractor every week to fix the damage caused by toting the resulting heavy bags.
But more importantly, I noticed that, despite an expansive collection of shoes, I tend to wear the same three or four pairs in rotation. So I started keeping them at my desk. More shoes appeared when there were rainstorms (my wellies have taken up permanent residence under my desk, which is really unfortunate when I need them at home), or when a spur-of-the-moment night out came up, causing me to leave my commuter shoes (aka flats) at work. Now, as Anya says, you can't tell where her pile of shoes starts and where mine ends.
I've spoken to friends and colleagues who also store things under their desks (that Gilt purchase that needs to go to the post office, or those back issues of Vice, for instance), and as I walk around our offices I notice snow boots peeking out from under their workspaces (it's August, people!). Jessica Misener, our Style News Editor, copped to recently cleaning out her shoe stash -- only because she couldn't fit her legs under her desk anymore.
In an effort to clean up, I've started using a file cabinet as shoe storage in the filing cabinet next to my desk (file those red pumps under "L" for Louboutin!). The fact is that now that everything is digitized, I no longer have many paper files, so there's room for my footwear. I may even see if I can build some kind of personalized organizerin there. So if you see me in the office carrying a hammer and nails, you'll know why.
Do you use your desk as a storage unit? What do you keep in your office space?
