Earlier this year the desk on which Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations went up for sale. It was a clumpy Victorian piece of furniture, made of dark mahogany with heavy drawers on either side in a style so unfashionable that similar ones are to be had on Ebay for about 500.

今年早些时候，查尔斯狄更斯(Charles Dickens)写《远大前程》(Great Expectations)时所用的桌子要出售了。那是一件笨重的维多利亚时期家具，用暗色桃花心木制成，两边都有沉重的抽屉，这种风格实在太过时了，类似的款式在Ebay上只要大概500英镑就可以买到。

Yet such is the relationship between a person and his workstation that this particular desk — along with the chair on which the author placed his famous behind — is now on display at his former house in Doughty Street, thanks to a charitable grant of more than 780,000.

然而，一个人和他的工作台的关系就是如此紧密，得益于一笔超过78万英镑的慈善捐款，这张桌子——和作者著名的臀部曾经坐过的那把椅子一起——现在都在伦敦道蒂街(Doughty Street)的狄更斯故居里展出。

Desks tell us a good deal about the person who sits at them — as well as about the time at which the sitting was done. What Dickens’ desk says is that writing is a serious but solitary business — and that the man who wrote here was important and prosperous.

桌子能够极大地揭示坐在桌旁的人是一个什么样的人、以及这个人坐在桌旁时处于一个什么样的时代。狄更斯的桌子透露出，写作是件严肃但孤独的事情，曾经在这张桌子上写作的那个人是个事业成功的重要人物。

My desk is made of beige melamine with grey metal legs and designed to slot together with similar ones. It is not a thing of beauty; its only design quirk is a scooped out arc in the middle at the front, as if to accommodate a beer belly.

我的桌子是米色的三聚氰胺板制成的，灰色金属桌腿，其设计目的是为了和相似的桌子拼在一起。它并不美；唯一有设计感的地方是在桌子前部中间呈弧形凹进去，就像是为了让有啤酒肚的人坐着舒适。

This desk says I work in a democratic, faceless age, preoccupied by the ideas of teamwork and practicality. The scoop tells you not about the girth of workers, but that we care about ergonomics. The chair that goes with it is so comfortable that its occupant can sit there for 12 hours at a stretch without discomfort.

这张桌子透露出，我生活在一个民主、缺乏个性的时代，这个时代的主导思想是团队合作和实用主义。那个凹陷的设计透露出的不是员工的身材，而是我们对人体工程学的关注。这张桌子配备的椅子如此舒适，在上面连续坐上12个小时也不会难受。

On my desk, alongside a computer, various old sandwich wrappers, some management books, old newspapers and magazines, a grubby sling, a bike helmet and a clutter of pens and papers are lying around. In the drawers, along with Biros and tights, is a BlackBerry box dating from a decade ago. The clues are not hard to decipher: I cycle, Ihurt my arm recently, I do not take proper lunch breaks and my job involves scanning publications for ideas.

在我的桌子上，除了一台电脑，还散落着各种各样用过的三明治包装纸，一些管理学书籍，旧报纸和杂志，一条脏兮兮的手臂悬带，一个自行车头盔，还有一堆笔和纸。抽屉里，除了一些圆珠笔和丝袜，还有一个有10多年历史的黑莓(BlackBerry)手机盒子。这些线索不难解读：我骑自行车，我最近弄伤过胳膊，我没有用午休时间正经吃午餐，以及我的工作涉及通过阅读来获取灵感。

It also tells you that I have been sitting in this very place for a long time.

这张办公桌还透露出，我已经在这个位置坐了很长一段时间了。

In this, I am becoming increasingly unusual. More and more, the typical office desk has nothing on it, as the amount of time any given worker sits in a particular spot is one day. When hot desking was introduced some 15 years ago, no one thought it would ever catch on.

就这一点而言，我正日益变成少数派。一张办公桌上空无一物将日益成为常态，因为任何一个员工坐在特定的某张桌子旁的时间也就是一天。大约15年前非固定办公桌（Hot-desking，又称办公桌轮用制）出现在办公室的时候，没人认为这种做法会流行起来。

Now they do it in Whitehall, where earlier this year there was a minor scandal over workers queuing for desks. The civil service has a rule that there should be seven desks for every 10 workers — you do not need to be a mathematical genius to see the charm of this potential cost saving of 30 per cent. They do it at the BBC, where the desk shortage has been famously satirised in the comic television drama W1A. Even the governor of the Bank of England does it. When he took over the BoE, Mark Carney was so determined to be modern he took his laptop and went to squat at the desks of different departments (though he kept his own desk in his private office to fall back on).

现在，白厅(Whitehall)就采取这种做法，今年早些时候还闹出一桩小小的丑闻——在那里上班的人得排队使用办公桌。公务员系统有规定，要求每10人应配有7张桌子——你不必是个数学天才也能看出可能节省30%的成本挺不错的。英国广播公司(BBC)也这么干，电视喜剧《W1A》有段著名的情节就是讽刺该公司办公桌的短缺。甚至英国央行行长也这么干。执掌英国央行后，马克愠尼(Mark Carney)如此坚决地要做一个现代人，于是他带上笔记本到各个不同部门占用办公桌（尽管保险起见，他还保留着自己私人办公室的办公桌）。

Yet this vision of the worker, a nomad who wanders around clutching the tools of his trade, which seems so very modern, is not at all new. Hot-desking was a 16th-century phenomenon. The only difference was that scribes lugged the desk — or deske — around with them from job to job. The deske was a legless wood box with a sloping top on which the scribe leaned as he wrote down the words of whoever hired him. The desks of both scribe and hot-desker tell a story of rootlessness, that they are brains for hire, and likely to move on whenever it suits them.

员工的这种形象——像游牧民那样带着自己的谋生工具四处游荡——似乎十分现代，但一点也不新鲜。非固定办公桌在16世纪就出现了。唯一的区别是当时的抄写员是拖着桌子（deske，不同于现代英语中的桌子(desk)）辗转于不同的工作地点。当时的桌子是一个没有桌腿的木箱，桌面是倾斜的，抄写员伏在倾斜的桌面上抄写雇主让他抄写的文字。16世纪的抄写员和现代使用非固定办公桌的职员，他们的桌子都讲述了一个漂泊不定的故事，他们是供雇佣的脑力劳动者，会在任何需要的时候转换工作地点。

In the few hundred years between the deske and hotdesk, this piece of furniture has told a different story, which has been mainly about status.

从“deske”到“hotdesk”的几百年间，这件家具讲述了一个不同的故事，主要是关于地位。

The rule was simple: the larger it was and the more expensive the wood, the grander its occupant. The more the desk looked as if it might belong in a sitting room, the more distant its owner was pretending to be from the work itself, and therefore the greater the power.

规则很简单：桌子越大，木材越昂贵，其占有者就越是位高权重。桌子越像是本应放在客厅的桌子，其所有者越是假装远离工作，因此其权力就越大。

The desk was also a physical way to establish distance. All visits to an executive office took place with the exec on one side of his mammoth slab of a desk, and the visitor on the other. This a the executive to pull all sorts of tricks to remind everyone who had the upper hand. I remember visiting Lord Weinstock in his office at General Electric in the early 1990s to find him sitting in a pool of light on his side, while the visitor was expected to sit in darkness.

桌子也是一种实实在在制造距离的方式。所有造访高管办公室的情景，都是高管在他巨大的桌子的一边，访客则处于另一边。这让高管可以使尽各种招数提醒所有人谁占了上风。我还记得上世纪90年代初造访温斯托克勋爵(Lord Weinstock)在GEC的办公室，我发现他坐在一片光亮之中，而来访者则要坐在黑暗里。

The early white-collar workers stood or perched on stools at high wooden desks in damp basements and garrets, where they were quite likely to contract tuberculosis as well as eye strain.

早期的白领在潮湿的地下室和阁楼里，站着或坐在凳子上，在高高的木桌旁工作，他们在工作中很可能会患上肺结核，或者眼疲劳。

But then when the first big office building went up at the end of the 19th century, clerks were seated at identical desks, arranged in lines like in a factory. Nearly 150 years later, offices might have football tables, but little has changed in the basic layout. In most offices workers are crowded into identical desks arranged in lines.

等到了19世纪末，第一批大型办公楼建起来的时候，职员们都坐在一模一样的桌子旁，像工厂里那样排列成行。近150年过去了，办公室或许有了足球桌，但基本格局没多大变化。在大多数办公室里，员工们依然挤在排列成行的相同办公桌旁边。

But then hierarchies started to topple, and overt displays of power expressed through size of furniture were out. The modern corporate ethos is all about openness. So meetings are held at sofas on which host and guest perch awkwardly, apparently equal, side by side.

然后，等级制度开始瓦解，通过家具的大小来公开展示权力的方式过时了。现代企业的理念都与开放性相关。因此，现在主客会面时是尴尬地并肩坐在沙发上，主客之间看上去地位平等。

In modern companies the CEO’s desk is likely to be identical in size and material to the desk of his PA (if he still has such a thing). No one believes this nod to equality — pay disparities are greater than ever, and the reverence shown to the top person is rising — but now it is vulgar to flaunt status through furniture.

在现代企业中，首席执行官的桌子可能和他的个人助理（如果他还有个人助理的话）的桌子拥有相同的大小和材质。没人相信这代表平等——收入差距比以往任何时候都大，社会对金字塔顶端人物的崇敬也在上升——但现在通过家具来炫耀地位是庸俗的做法。

The current way to use your desk to show off is by dispensing with your chair. Indeed, in a reversion to the earliest offices, standing is back in.

现在利用你的桌子来炫耀的方式是抛弃你的椅子。事实上，最早的办公室里采用过的站立式工作又开始流行起来了。

But this time it is not fashionable employers can pack people in, and save on the cost of a chair — just the opposite. Workers no longer stand as a sign that employers do not care about their wellbeing, but as evidence that they do.

但这一次，这种方式的流行不是因为雇主能够在办公室多塞进几个人，以及节省椅子的成本——正好相反：员工站着工作不再证明雇主不关心他们的健康，而是证明他们关心。

Sitting, doctors will tell you, gives you diabetes, makes you obese and may kill you. Not only in fashionable companies such as Google and Facebook, the rows of people sitting at their desk are interrupted by people standing. Some of these desks are like normal ones on stilts, while others are elevator desks that can be either up or down depending on whether you feel like being on your feet or on your bottom.

医生们会告诉你，久坐会让你得糖尿病，让你肥胖，甚至可能致死。现在，不仅是在谷歌(Google)和Facebook这样时髦的公司，坐着办公的人之间会间或出现一些站着办公的人。这些桌子有的像是支高了的正常桌子，有的则是升降桌，可以根据你是想站着还是坐着自由调节高度。

Of higher status still is a treadmill desk, which allows you to do your spreadsheets while you walk on a moving loop of rubber. The message is not a subtle one and says: I care about fitness. I multitask, I do not waste a second of my valuable time. My company has spent a lot of money on me, and I don’t care if the noise of me galumphing along is distracting my colleagues.

地位更高的人可以用跑步机桌子，你可以一边在移动的橡胶跑带上行走一边做电子表格。这透露出的讯息很明显：我关心健康。我可以同时处理多个任务，我不会浪费我宝贵时间中的一分一秒。我的公司在我身上花了很多钱，我不在乎我行走的声音会不会打扰我的同事。

Yet even this is not the last word in status. Not long ago LinkedIn did a series about where its “key influencers” worked. Here were lots of boring desks, many of them not unlike mine. But in the middle was a picture of Sir Richard Branson working with colleagues on a beach.

然而，即使如此，这也不是地位的终极象征。不久前，领英(LinkedIn)制作了一个具有 “关键影响力的人物”(key influencer)在哪里工作的系列活动。其中有很多乏味的桌子，很多和我的不无相像。但在中间有张理查德布兰森爵士(Sir Richard Branson)和同事们在沙滩上工作的照片。

This is the ultimate status symbol: not to have a desk at all.

这才是终极的地位象征：根本就不用桌子。