The paperweight moved twice

An original literary non-fiction-style account of returning to a shared workplace desk after a week away.

The glass paperweight was on the other side of the desk when I returned. Everything else seemed nearly right. The stapler faced the same way, the screen had been lowered to my preferred height and the notes were stacked in a careful square. I moved the paperweight back to the left before opening my messages.

My colleague had used the desk while I was away. He asked whether I had found the handover sheet. I pointed to the square stack. He said that it was underneath the glass. He had placed the sheet there so that I would see the three matters still waiting for a reply. When I moved the weight, I had put the sheet under the other notes without reading it.

For the rest of the morning, I worked through the messages. Several had been answered before I returned. Others contained brief explanations of what he had done and what he had left for me to decide. I noticed that he had not tried to imitate my usual phrases. The replies were shorter and, in one case, clearer than the version I had begun composing in my head.

At lunch, he asked whether the arrangement of the desk had been all right. I said that I had moved the paperweight. He apologised at once. I began explaining the importance of keeping things in their places, then stopped. He had remembered the screen height, left a usable record and dealt with work that would otherwise have waited for me.

That afternoon, I put the handover sheet back under the glass on the right. There were still two matters to resolve. The desk looked slightly wrong from my chair, but the unfinished work was where I could see it.

Explain how the narrator reassesses the colleague's use of the desk.