By no means an orchid fanatic, it does please me when they rebloom, and only then will I show them here
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By no means an orchid fanatic, it does please me when they rebloom, and only then will I show them here
A friend was bemoaning the fact that he would shortly be forced to work only from home and replied thoughtfully to my challenge to blog his reasons: . I have to say, most of Larry’s reasons resonated for me, because I generally love working from home, even though I barely do any paying work these days. I am sure that under his constraints, I would hate it too.
This is always a challenge, I agree, and one with which I sympathise. But it doesn’t bother me nearly so much. I’ve always made it a rule, almost unbreakable, that when I am not on the clock, as it were, I am not available. I check email two or three times a day, at the start and the finish and sometimes before or after lunch, and that was my habit in the office too.1 Between finish and start, I am not available except for emergencies, which require the use of a channel other than email, and I decide what constitutes an emergency.
Not having to travel to and from work gives me more time to work or do something else. More to the point, I have no compunction about getting up from my desk to hang the laundry, or put the soup on, or pop my bread in the oven. That makes for a much less stressful life than squeezing all such tasks into evenings and the weekend.
But, and it is a big butt (sic), if, like Larry, work had ever tried to enforce a camera-on policy, or a keyboard monitor, I would have been out of there quicker than you could say knife.
This has never been a problem for me. In fact, the absence of a commute generally translated into more time outside the house. What I do miss is socialising at the office. Lunch with various colleagues, the small interactions, a shared coffee; those are the things that I need, and now that I am retired, I find I need them more than ever and I don’t get them and that does depress me. I just have not been able to form much of a social network away from work.
Look, anything that means I don’t have to use Sharepoint is a giant win. My connectivity is great, and I was paying for it anyway to use nights and weekends, so no change there. I’ve managed to play dumb with clients who send me weird links and persuade them to send me the actual file, and they can generally do that. Some clients insisted I use Teams to talk to them, which remained a burr under my saddle, but they’ve mostly dropped away. I’ll probably ditch MS Office when this year’s subscription ends because the alternatives are better and frankly, as long as they get a document that they can open by double-clicking on it, clients have no clue how I produced it.
An office on which I could close the door would be a distinct upgrade, but I am happy enough with my quarter of the living room. It is easy to avoid when I am not working and serves the family with music and things to watch of an evening. I would love to have a place where I could leave physical projects half finished. I’m OK with interruptions to help with whatever. If I can’t stop, I say so, and if I can, I’m usually grateful to be taken away no matter how briefly.
I have spent more of my working life as a freelance than as a salaried employee, so in a sense working from home has been the norm when I am not at a client’s premises. If I didn’t love it, that would never have worked. Back in the day, though, I was at someone else’s office at least once a week. That gave me the social interactions I no longer have, and that’s what I miss most. And, as if to prove Larry’s point about being available 24/7, my ex-colleagues who are now mostly working from home seldom seem to have the time for a quick lunch or a coffee. That sucks. For both of us.
How I loved those phone conversations in the office. “Did you get my email?” “I don’t know.” “Shall I send it again?” “If you like, but I won’t see it until I open my email again.” “Oh.” ↩
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