Practical accommodations for the incorporeal coworker who has claimed your ergonomic setup and started joining your calls

Between 9 and 11 a.m., your desk chair is not yours. This is not a metaphor about motivation or creative blocks. The chair is occupied. You can tell because the room temperature drops approximately four degrees in that sector, the seat cushion holds an impression that doesn’t match your weight distribution, and at least three people — two of whom have asked me not to use their names — have watched it rotate slowly toward the window on its own axis while their laptop screen flickered. If you are experiencing this, I want you to know that you are not the first, and that there is a functional way to structure your morning around it.

The first practical adjustment is temporal. Move your high-focus work to before 9 or after 11. Whatever is using your chair between those hours does not appear to disturb documents, keyboards, or monitors — it has not, to anyone’s knowledge, deleted a file or closed a tab. It simply occupies the space in a way that most people find too distracting to work through. That’s reasonable. Treat it the way you would treat a neighbor running a leaf blower: not dangerous, just incompatible with concentration. Schedule your calls, your writing, your billing, your anything that requires you to be seated at a desk, outside that window. Use the two hours for tasks you can do standing at a counter, walking a hallway, or sitting in your car in the driveway with the heat on.

Community Notice

The call issue is different and worth addressing directly. Two of the three witnesses I spoke with reported that whatever is present in the chair began appearing during video calls in the past six weeks — not visibly, but audibly, and only to the people on the other end of the call. One witness described it as "like someone exhaling very slowly into a second microphone." A colleague in Bend told her she sounded like she was calling from a tunnel. She was not. If this is happening to you, external headsets with directional microphones reduce the effect significantly. It also helps to move your camera angle so you are not framing the chair behind you. I don’t have a clean explanation for why the second fix works. It works.

I’ve filed this under Wraith for classification purposes, though I want to be precise: the behavior pattern here is consistent with what we typically log under that designation — fixed location, fixed hours, temperature differential, no physical interaction — but wraith attribution is a working category, not a conclusion. What I can say with confidence is that it is consistent across three separate households, none of which are adjacent, all in the same valley drainage, and all reporting onset within the same two-week period in October. That’s a pattern. Patterns mean something. In the meantime: lap desk, standing setup, or the dining table before nine. Your chair will be available by midmorning. It always is.