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Home, sweet work

Feeling anti-social? Don’t mind not being seen working? Don’t go to office

Last fortnight, I completed one year of not working from office. Now this isn’t a subtle way of saying that I’ve stopped working altogether. I do earn a living and let’s not nitpick what defines ‘work’, shall we?

Since the day I stopped going to office happened to be International Labour Day — for the likes of Sheikh Yerbouti and Princess Leia who have never worked from an office or a yacht in their lives, that happens to be on May 1 — the irony is keen. But after an initial three-four weeks of flailing about and general despondency that involved frantically arranging icons on my desktop and figuring out whether to place the ashtray on the right or on the left of my lamp, I did settle down and get into the groove.

I’ve faced some irritants since working from home. On the minor scale, there’s the answering of the door. This usually involves the arrival of mail, a maid or an unexpected punk who asks things like: “Sir, could you give me five minutes? I’d like to discuss a scheme by which you can provide a future to a girl in a village who needs a future.” But the serious downside of a home office is the proximity to beds.

Do I miss the office coffee machine or the water cooler moments or the hand-holding exercises that have included colleagues seeking advice about how to teach another colleague a lesson as well as how to convince a boyfriend to get serious about a relationship? Um, nope.

In February, the working world was agog when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working from home. Thankfully, I don’t work for Yahoo, not even as a freelance. So in all honesty, I chuckled when I read Mayer’s leaked internal memo. It said strangely ma’army things like “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home” and “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.”

Luckily, with no other person around in my apartment during the day, I have no distractions at home. So quality (one hopes) and speed are not casualties. Quite the opposite (especially about speed) actually. As for ‘the best decisions and insights’, clearly Mayer’s not visited the hallways and canteens I have walked along and sat in during the 19 years of office life before I jumped ship with my rubber ducky. And meetings, impromptu or otherwise, have overwhelmingly been either an excuse to have coffee and biscuits while engaging in the sport of ‘Kiss Your Boss’s Bottom’, or total drone nightmares that have greyed my hair prematurely.

I do understand that there are certain jobs that require one’s actual physical presence. Farming, working in a factory, being a waiter at a restaurant are three jobs I can immediately think of that need no-questions-asked physical presence. I knew a chauffeur who had to be fired because he thought he could drive the car ‘remotely’ by not showing up every day.

But a line of work that essentially requires a telephone, an Internet-connected computer and that includes the option of stepping out of home — my kind of job — not only allows you to flourish by working from home, but makes more sense for your clients/employee(s). And it isn’t as if there’s an Anti-Marissa Mayer out there who forbids people working from home from going out on work.

Everyone speaking about working from home after Mayer’s grand ban has focused on women and the ‘work-life’ balance along with rearing kids at home. I’m not a woman. My work-life balance is still skewed towards work (my motto being ‘Rust never sleeps’) and I don’t have kids. I work from home because I choose to and because I love beds being very close to me.