The argument about how many days was conducted in public, at enormous length, by people with strong views about collaboration. It was a policy argument, and policy arguments are the kind organisations know how to have.

Meanwhile the buildings themselves changed, and that was handled as facilities management. Floors were given up. Desks were reduced to a ratio of the headcount, because the whole point of hybrid was that not everyone came in. Fixed desks became bookable ones, which meant the chair you sat in was whichever chair was at the desk the system gave you. Storage went, because a hot desk cannot have a drawer. Quiet rooms were converted into meeting rooms, because meetings were the reason people were supposedly coming in.

Then attendance mandates arrived and put the old number of people back into the new arrangement.

What a booking system actually allocates

In principle, a desk. In practice, a chair, a monitor height, a distance from a door, a proximity to whoever else booked nearby, and a set of physical conditions you cannot predict when you book and cannot change when you arrive.

Anyone who has a body with requirements knows how this goes. A chair adjusted for you yesterday is adjusted for someone else today. A monitor arm set for your eye line is not. If you need a particular chair — and a substantial number of people do, for back pain, for pregnancy, for a knee, for width, for height, for any of a hundred reasons — you are now negotiating for it every time you come in, with a system that treats desks as interchangeable because the spreadsheet does.

Formal workplace adjustments exist and are worth using, but they were designed around a fixed desk that belonged to a person. Attaching them to a rotating allocation is a problem most organisations have not actually solved; they have issued a policy saying it is solved.

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The cost is paid in the commute, unevenly

The other half of the mandate is the journey, and the journey is where the policy is least evenly felt. Three fixed days is a different proposition for someone twenty minutes away than for someone with a ninety-minute each-way commute, and it is a different proposition again for anyone whose transport requires a seat rather than a standing space on a full train.

None of that appears in the business case, because the business case measures office utilisation and attrition, and the people for whom the arrangement is most expensive tend to absorb the cost quietly first and leave later, at which point it is recorded as attrition with no stated cause.

Why the furniture is the thing worth raising

Because unlike the number of days, it is negotiable, specific and cheap. A named desk is free to allocate. A chair with a higher weight rating and a wider seat costs a few hundred pounds once, which is a rounding error against the cost of a floor. Monitor arms, footrests and a reserved locker are all trivial purchases that facilities budgets already have lines for.

And these requests succeed far more often than the requests about attendance do, because they land on a manager who can actually say yes. The days are decided several floors up. The chair is decided by someone with a catalogue.

How to ask

In writing, specifically, and framed around doing the job rather than around comfort. I need a fixed desk allocation on my attendance days and a chair rated for my use, because the current booking arrangement means I spend the first twenty minutes of each day adjusting equipment and I finish the day unable to concentrate.

Specific, tied to output, and in an email. Verbal requests evaporate; written ones become a thread with a date on it.

The part that is not fixable by asking

Some of this is genuinely structural. A building with fewer desks than people cannot give everyone a fixed one, and an organisation that gave up two floors is not taking them back because the chairs are wrong.

Which is worth knowing, because it changes the question from how do I get this fixed to how much of this am I prepared to absorb — and that is a question about the job, not about the furniture. The people currently answering it quietly, by leaving, are answering it correctly.