Ten seconds to a standing desk (or, the airport lounge story)
Story. Mumbai T2, gate 47, a Tuesday evening in March. My Indigo flight is delayed by three hours — and not the cute kind, the proper Indian airport kind, where the screen says ON TIME and the gate says nothing. I have a board deck due by morning. My laptop battery is at 38%. There are no plug points free because seventeen other people are in the same situation.
This is the part where most people would surrender and order an overpriced sandwich. I had the SoboPad Rise in my backpack.
What I did next
The Rise looks, in its folded state, like a thin panel of card. It weighs less than my MacBook. I pulled it out, found a low table near the window, creased it along the printed fold lines, locked the panels into the third mode, and stood my laptop on it at exactly the height my elbows wanted. Standing-desk mode. In a gate at T2. People stared.
I wrote the deck standing up for ninety minutes. When my flight was finally announced, I folded the Rise back down — eleven creases reverse the same way they assemble — slid it into the laptop sleeve, and walked onto the plane.
Five modes, one panel
There is the flat mode — a thin desk pad if you do not need any elevation. There is the typing-angle mode that ergonomists like. There is the higher mode that gets the screen to eye level. There is the lap mode for when you are on your sofa at 11 pm and the kid is finally asleep. And there is the full standing-desk mode, which is the one that saved me at the airport.
I used to own a motorised sit-stand desk. It cost a small fortune and it lives in the spare room because we moved houses and it is too big to bring downstairs. The Rise lives in my bag. I do not know which of us moved on first.