What do you see in this picture?

During a visit to a client, I noticed this contraption in a conference room. Allow me to explain. The room is small and oddly shaped. The floor power outlet is not in the middle of the room. It is closer to a side wall. The table is designed to have all the wires go up through the middle of the table. Therefore, the position of the floor outlet relative to where the table needs to be in the room presents a unique challenge.

The obvious alternative is to rotate the table. Such a solution has its own set of challenges. The chairs are on wheels, and the table is four-legged. If you rotate the table, you will have to roll over the floor outlet constantly, and you will end up with the cables between your legs. Not great.

The other obvious solution is to move the table. The picture does not show it, but the floor outlet is too close to a wall so you would end up having a 3-seater and a big space in the conference room.

You can also move the floor outlet. Possible but very costly. The floor is most likely concrete underneath the carpet. That is an expensive fix for such a little problem.

So, what did the people do? They improvised. I can imagine someone, one day, having enough of a wobbly table or not being able to sit comfortably on that side of the table. They took whatever they could find and solved it. I wonder if this happened over multiple attempts. The material used in the construction of the support and the results (the table was very stable) make me believe that people iterated on this. They scavaged what was around them and create a solution. What do I see in this picture? It is easy to see the problems. I see the ingenuity

Also, kudos to the cleaning crew for not destroying this every time they vacuum the room!