Finally Home

Working at home is wonderful. I can testify to that after decades of working in various "real" offices.

The big benefit is no commute. Additionally, you can generally set your own hours, decide on the ambiance, pick the dress code (PJs or jeans?), and choose your co-workers.

My dogs are wonderful co-workers, but I admit the cats have a tendency to interrupt by sitting on my paperwork or strolling across the keypad. [Okay, maybe I wouldn’t exactly choose the cats, but on the whole…]

As the number of people working from home increases, so do the magazine articles telling you how to work from home correctly - with the authors each providing their own sometimes wildly differing definition of what is correct. In order to understand this discrepancy, keep in mind that some of these articles may be written by people in their PJs sitting in the spare bedroom while others are authored by bitter full-time staff writers who are required to dress up and travel to an office in the outside world at least five days a week.

Recently these articles seem to be veering away from praising the convenience and informality of working at home and moving toward how to make the home office just like a “real world” office. Well, what fun is that? If I wanted a “real world” job I would go and get one and have someone else figuring out the taxes and providing medical benefits.

Being at home I can let the dogs out when needed, empty the dryer when the buzzer goes off, and take the pie out of the oven when the aroma says it’s time for a coffee break.

If I have a hankering to get out of “the office” I can go pick up milk or bread during the day when the stores are less busy and the employees aren’t as frazzled.

Sorry, I have to stop now. Sniff, sniff…mmm…it’s time for my coffee break.

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To be fair, I have decided to mention the negatives of working at home. Getting the other human inhabitants of the house to understand that you are working. No steady paycheck. Um…let’s see…uh…let me think about this for a while. I’ll have my people call your people when I get back to the office.