Working From Home

     My Dad used to bring home work on the weekends sometimes so he could work from home in his study. He was a decent typist but sometimes would rely upon my Mom who was a professional secretary before she was married and never lost the touch.

      Today the term "working from home" has an old fashioned attractiveness to it for someone who doesn't understand our always connected work world. Now we can have calls, emails, and faxes at all hours of the day and night. My Dad was a solitary worker on those weekends and rarely would have had a colleague or client call to confer about something.

      Which is the more civilized life style: one where you literally go to work or one where you are always with your work? Hard to say because the commute my Dad had to his 40 Wall Street office was fairly brutal when you consider he had to walk to the train then take a subway and finally walk to the office. It was just under 3 hours round trip and more if the weather was bad. When you work at home during a snow storm or transit strike there are still plenty of ways to contribute even if you miss a few face-to-face meetings with the boss or client. It just didn't happen like that in the old days. What's more, if there was a major blackout like the one we had in the mid 1960s in NYC you might spend the night at the office like my Dad and his colleagues did. The funny thing in retrospect about "The Blackout" was the rotary phones worked. They were powered by the Phone Company telephone cables but everything else was not connected via dedicated lines in this manner. All we had were a supply of candles and the faint hope that all the food in the refrigerator wouldn't spoil.

      In today's world of VoIP (Internet-based Phone service) when the power goes out, even just in your home, one quickly discovers that if you rely upon the cable company you won't have a dial tone. Of course, you will still have your cell phone as long as you can keep it charged and the people you want to speak with do the same. Again, another trade-off and who is to say which is the better way to live?

      If my preference counts for anything then I guess working from home now is better than working from home for my parent's generation. I think the tremendous amount of time we waste in office politics tips the scale in favor of home offices. Work is hard enough but if you have to listen to the griping of disgruntled co-workers, smell their lunches boiling away in the microwaves, and have to pretend like you are working when you really aren't, then you are truly better off at home with email and cell phones.

      What this all means is that the solitary weekend worker of the 1960s and 70s, who had few distractions, has been replaced by the solitary, multitasking worker who is distracted wherever Internet and cell phone coverage is available. The drive for career success is the same in both eras, but the modern day distractions dictated by the exigencies of many a career are starkly different and take some getting used to. One day I hope to master these modern demands, if possible, and be able to maintain a calm like those slow but steady rat-ta-tat-tat sounds produced by my Dad's old Underwood typewriter on a Sunday afternoon.