You turn on your desk lamp and scan your bookshelves in the dim light.

It's a desk lamp that looks like a floodlight pylon.

Designers handpicked the color of your dishes, your desk lamp and even the bag of chips you ate for lunch.

Every kitchen tap, office chair and desk lamp precisely mirror a time when postwar fustiness was giving way to sharp, primary-colour modernism.

This he made by gouging a hole in the lid of a plastic storage box and inserting the head of a desk lamp.

A desk officer once asked her gingerly if his secretary could work beyond tea-time.

So when a desk officer typed his name into a database as a matter of routine, the result made jaws drop.

It was hoped that computerization would reduce the dependence on staff during 2001 restructuring of the department following desk officer system.

Initially, it was composed of just a single desk officer with the intention that it would be augmented by additional personnel when required.

If we can't rely on desk officers to do their job, we might as well surrender.

I sometimes answer the desk phone of an absent colleague.

But a trader could put the desk phone down and pick up the mobile.

She dials the number and hands him the desk phone.

She uses her desk phone 'rarely, maybe once or twice a week'.

So only one phone number need be given out to receive calls on either a mobile or desk phone.

The relaxed mood extends to the hotel's 'business centre' — an empty desk and a can of mozzie spray.

He just has a small, empty desk, perched next to his those of his aides.

Which of those four-year-olds will not gaze at that peg, at that empty desk, and wonder what happened?

The image of the solitary rose on his empty desk was broadcast around the nation.

Departure boards listed rows of cancelled flights and check-in staff stood around their empty desks.

He spent a year in the back office before joining a trading desk, where he found managers willing to provide him with challenges.

Its fixed-income trading desk increased income by 34 per cent to $5 billion, as revenue from its equities desk rose by 28 per cent to $2.2 billion.

One reported that the trading desk had developed a plan to 'put on an enormous directional short' and that 'the results of that are obvious'.

He instantly apologised and picked up the phone to his trading desk.

He said colleagues on the trading desk 'not only hated me, but they also promoted that hate throughout the floor'.