Your co-worker's desk might be yours now

Okay, so picture this: You’re finally back on the Hill, enduring the full four-day return to office that everyone *loves*, and suddenly your favourite quiet corner desk, the one with the good view of the Peace Tower, is gone. Not just taken by someone else, but *reallocated* by the federal government. Yes, you heard me right. The latest buzz from our friends in the public service suggests that those co-working spaces, the ones that were supposed to be all flexible and modern, are now on the chopping block. Departments are short on space trying to fit everyone in, so the solution? Just take shared workstations and give them to someone else. It’s like musical chairs, but with cubicles and a whole lot of internal memos.

### The Bureaucracy Shuffle

This is peak Ottawa, non? Only here would the response to a space crunch be to re-designate existing shared spaces rather than, you know, actually finding more space. We all know how much public servants love their routines, their specific coffee spots, their preferred walking route from Parliament to Sparks Street. Now, imagine arriving on Monday morning only to find your carefully chosen “hotel desk” has a new occupant, because some Director-General decided their team needed more dedicated real estate. This is going to be a real *dossier* for some folks, I tell you.

* **What it means for you:** If you work for the feds, prepare for some potential desk musical chairs.

* **What it means for Ottawa:** More public servants physically in the core, trying to find parking, flooding the Elgin Street Tim Hortons.

The real story is never on the Hill – it’s always just off it, in the scramble for a good seat at the office. This is going to create some *très intéressante* water cooler conversations, and probably a few passive-aggressive notes left on keyboards. It’s a very Ottawa problem, and it's certainly not boring, just… structured.

Simone Okafor-Bouchard, MiTL Sports Desk.

You know Keith and the gang are already dissecting this on the morning show — catch it live at mornings.live.