I adore Steve Carell. The Office kept me good company while I worked in government and realised The Office jokes were very much based on reality. But one of my favourite Steve Carell moments is from Anchorman - the I love lamp scene. This post isn't actually about my love for Steve Carell. It's about how much I love the new desk lamp that Boyfriend Pham bought for me.

I work from home 2-3 days a week and my desk nook is quite dark. It's not near the one window that would have shed light on it except for the part where it's west facing, doesn't get morning sun and the afternoon sun is blocked by our neighbours' generous garden trees. It keeps the house nice and cool through summer but also keeps the desk nook quite dark. Too dark for Zoom meetings because you can see my silhouette against a bright background and not my facial expressions.

For some reason, the downlights in the room are wired so that if I turn on the light over the desk, it turns on 3 downlights. It seemed excessive and wasteful to have them on all day while I worked on and off in Zoom. In my last role, I had a work Macbook that isn't a decade old so the camera was OK in low light. In the new and not improved Windows environment, the laptop camera and Logitech camera couldn't agree with Zoom to show my face in low light.

I mentioned this to Boyfriend Pham in passing one day and he went and found the Vivo vesa mount desk lamp that mounts to the back of the screen (instead of the cumbersome clip-on that blocks part of the screen or one that grips the desk). This means I can set and forget the lamp - it adjusts with the screen when I move the screen up and down, and doesn't block my view at all. Unlike the cat, who constantly gets in my way.