Deirdre Reynolds: I’m with Trump when it comes to ‘grot-desking’

But on the divisive issue of hot desking, this week, I went full MAGA: Make America Germ-free Again.

The notoriously germ-phobic president of the United States on Thursday had his historic Oval Office desk swapped out while it undergoes ‘refurbishment’.

Honestly, I’m just surprised he waited a whole week after Elon Musk’s young son appeared to rub snot on the important piece of furniture, first used by John F Kennedy in 1961, to have it fumigated.

Four year-old X Æ A-Xii (no, I’ve no idea how you pronounce that either) was caught on live TV seemingly wiping a booger on his dad’s boss’s desk after being inexplicably dragged along to a press conference in the White House last week.

And the face pulled by the 78 year-old was pretty much all of us forced to plonk down at a hot desk each morning.

Hot desking - or ‘grot desking’, as I like to call it - once the preserve of cool Silicon Valley start-ups, has firmly taken hold in offices across the country post-Covid, with shared desks in theory designed to offer more flexibility, as well as a less cluttered work space and chance to ‘synergise’ with different colleagues, as many employees continue to partly work from home.

In practice, hauling your laptop to and from work can be more like playing the influenza lottery, after research found that the average desk has 400 times more germs than a toilet seat, while the average keyboard is 20,000 times ickier.

At least Trump had the option of replacing the Resolute Desk, which was also used by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, with the six other equally salubrious ones that are at the disposal of the president of the day.

Spare a thought for the rest of us whose only line of defence against other people’s unidentified bodily goo is keeping a pack of Dettol anti-bacterial wipes in our handbag.

For all the desk nerds out there, the president will be signing his many, many executive orders on the C&O desk, used by President George HW Bush, among others, in the interim.

Presumably, he’ll also be praying that his head of DOGE, who allegedly welcomed a 13th child with right-wing influencer Ashley St Clair five months ago, doesn’t have any future childcare issues that cause him to bring any more of his ankle-biters to the office with him.

Because hot or not, when it comes to ‘snot desks’, for the first and only time: I’m with Trump.