Welcome to Capsule Considers, where we try out and review the latest products on the market and offer our honest, unbiased opinions, free from any obligation or expectation because if you’re parting with your hard-earned money based on any of our recommendations, we’re gonna make sure it’s damn well worth it. Emma trials the Logitech Casa Pop-Up Desk to finally feel like a proper working-from-home adult (three years in).
There’s a lot of talk about ‘imposter syndrome’, where you constantly feel like you’re a secret fraud at your job and one day, you’re going to be found out. And sure, who hasn’t been there.
But imposter syndrome is a kind of vague, fuzzy, worst-case scenario thinking. What I – and many, many other people in precarious industries – experience is something along the lines of ‘redundancy syndrome’, which is the very real problem that at any stage you might lose your job.
Why am I including this in an intro for a pop-up desk? Because it took me over three years of co-running a business to finally establish an actual desk for my working from home life, so deep was my redundancy syndrome.
Redundancy syndrome is rife amongst people who work in media, and it’s less of a paranoia, more of a surefire assumption that you will lose your job or, at the very least, be part of a ‘the living will envy the dead’ restructure set-up where you keep your job but absorb five other people’s as well.
Can you see why it took me so long to get a desk? I worked on my couch with a laptop for two straight years, in a posture that can only be described as a chiropractor’s nightmare, before finally sitting at an actual table this year (like a big girl).
But I needed a final step. And the push came only after Capsule’s Kelly (who has a STANDING desk, very adult) came to my house, saw my laptop balanced on a stack of cookbooks and announced, “You can’t live like this!”. She also in fact organised me to get the Casa Pop-Up Desk, had it delivered to my home and then ordered me to set it up. What can I say, I need a firm hand!
But once I did, I felt… anchored. I no longer had to move a stack of cookbooks every morning to be a proper working woman, I could just pop-up my wee desk. There are three pieces – a keyboard, a mouse, and a base that turns into a laptop stand. It attaches through Bluetooth which is EASY TO DO, especially for someone like me who refuses to read instructions.
And it’s fast to set up and put away again, because the same table I use for work is also our dining table and the table in which I feed my work-from-home colleague (infant son). Plus, I can take the whole set-up in my bag to a café or library and not look like a weirdo.
It makes me feel industrious, flexible… dare I say entrepreneurial???? Rather than a nervous ninny who was emotionally crippled by going through an industry that restructures itself into an anxiety attack every three months.
While I obviously would love to have an actual office with an actual desk, I don’t think I’ll be ready to afford that until I’m in my fifties. And I feel confident that this pop-up desk can see me through the next decade. Plus, thanks to the name, I can call it my Mojo Dojo Casa Desk, which is a Barbie joke that was very cool four months ago, but I still love!
Casa Pop-Up Desk, $329, Logitech
