This post is a shamelessly opportunistic stream of consciousness follow up to Larry’s Why I Hate Working From Home and Jeremy’s Why I Like Working From Home. Larry’s is a response to his employer’s unwelcome shift from office to remote working across the board, and Jeremy’s more of a summary of a self-employed life. (I’ve never been able summarise, so this might be unfair; read their words first).

Like theirs, mine is a personal view. Unlike theirs I couldn’t have written this without standing on the shoulders of their giant-ness.

Erm… there’s aren’t any indications from my employer that it’s likely. Winter’s pretty much over here and there are no stay-at-home mandates, thank goodness.

Then

My experience of working from home (or working at home as I still think of it) is limited to a total of 6 months enforced by the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. 6 years ago now. I was lucky enough to be loaned a laptop, so I could choose where I worked. Dining room table it was, spread out but stopping the proliferation of newly folded clothes we usually see.

What

I’m pretty tech-savvy so already had links to everything I needed – apart from paper records of course. And in fact I prepared the guides for the department to make their transitions easier. SharePoint, at least for me as a content creator and user, holds no scary corners now.

Teams, the Microsoft thing, was a godsend. I’ve heard other services are somehow better but I integrated SharePoint and Teams and built something useful we still rely on.

Free of casual interruptions, although my productivity didn’t exactly soar, I found my focus on even complex tasks was easily maintained. I hacked hours off jobs, created new methods that made things sustainable, and checked out all the major productivity/project planning methodologies/sites until I found one that clicked for me.

I found a comfortable niche.

Oops

My wife hated my constant presence. Hated the fact my posh headphones leaked the other side of conversations (and the music I used as a daily crutch – from bands I’d never previously have listened to). Hated my muttering when working through stuff. Hated the simple fact that she still had to travel into work.

My daughters were off school too, compounding the strife at home. I attempted to enforce a framework of study and rewards. Eventually the schools caught up and imposed some order to their education. I discovered I can’t teach, not as bad a thing as I’d thought when I began.

Now?

Not sure. I wouldn’t want to do any of it again, but if circumstances dictated I could. My girls are older, one’s at university and away most the week. The other in her final year of high school has a degree of independence I simply didn’t at her age.

We had the garage converted from a dumping ground into a room (with a heavy fireproof so sound-deadening door) and so I have choices.

We started a new contract with our broadband supplier, so speeds are easy multiples of what we had 6 years ago. 6 years ago I had to set up a supplementary router to work around a wireless bug in the ISP’s device. Again a validation of my expertise in areas unrelated to my work. (I use the term ‘expertise’ here, I think it means what it might not mean).

Bottom line

Anyway, if my employer decided to retain my services as I head towards retirement and thus obsolescence, I’d do it, sure.

What it’d do for our mental health, who knows.

When I started my working life, and even though I acquired my first home computer that year and bought into the ‘computers are our future’ ideal, no way could I have envisaged doing my job at home.

Would I want to?

Not in the same way, heck no.

And I would rather not prepare for the chance it might happen.

But maybe I don’t need to?