Dude, Where’s my Desk?

Industrial, loft-style floor plans. Banks of windows. Razor scooters to zip from one end of the office to the other. Basketball hoops. Video games. Ah the super cool, ultra-trendy offices of entrepreneurial America. Not exactly.

My friend Harry recently arrived at a new job to find that he didn’t have a desk or even a chair to call his own.

Harry’s new entrepreneur boss motioned to his own desk saying “I’m not always here.”

An entire drawer was made available for Harry’s use. Welcome to entrepreneurial America. Of course, this doesn’t always have to be the case, there are plenty of start-ups that have realized the need for a suitable workspace for their employees and will often head on over to somewhere similar to Office Monster and similar suppliers in order to build their office spaces to allow workers to be efficient as possible while performing every day tasks.

Park Yourself Here
The fact is, most entrepreneurs set up office without so much as a coffee pot to piss in. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose current offices are a selling point to potential new hires, offered little to his early employees. Their biggest office perk? A good parking spot.

Amazon’s first five employees worked out of Bezos’ garage for almost a year. Ditto for the first employees of Microsoft.

Unfortunately for you, these lean, early days of the company are also the glory days for your entrepreneur boss. The time when his inner business-MacGyver flourishes. He’s building a business out of two paper clips and Blackberry, and during the process barely meets the minimal requirements of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; food, shelter, sleep.

Get Over It, Get On With It
So your whiney, petulant need to sit in the office, have a heated work space, or, say, have internet access, is simply an extravagance that will have to wait.

Besides, no matter what your current hardship is, your entrepreneur boss has had it worse.

Before you joined in the crusade-when your entrepreneur first starting working on the Big Idea-he did so with only a milk crate to sit on.

…A milk crate that sat perched over a sewage drain.

…While sanitation workers were on strike.

The Early Days were always worse.

Working for Wonka? Know this: If you’re big on the idea of offices supplies being supplied by the office, go work at Mead Paper Products. If you happen to own your own pen, stock up on refills and head in to work.