Home Alone

About two weeks ago I noticed a friend’s post on Facebook wherein she said that she was getting used to working from home. I replied and my post went something like this: Don’t do it. You’ll regress / lose your voice / vocabulary / figure /sense of proportion / your friends and sanity. It’s mans’ worst invention.

Last week, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, (in)famously banned employees from working from home. Indeed the newspapers, radio and the telly-box have been brimming with related stories ever since. Some pieces have focused on productivity issues and others on the sociological impact of home-working, or the trust factors involved between employer and employee, namely, are you having a laugh at their expense?

Already the camps for and against are pretty well defined and entrenched. It seems that those employers who are doing the reigning-in are being branded as draconian and unreasonable and it will be interesting to see how or if this eventually affects their brands.

I can understand why home working is appealing to some or why it’s pivotal to others – those with children for example – but I also know that it’s lethal, especially if you live alone as I do, sans husband, partner, children, cats, dogs or budgies. I think that this is really an argument about personal growth and this is my two-penneth.

 

We all need Scalextric lines.

 

We know that kids need certainties, routines, structure and boundaries, because those things make them feel secure and they provide a framework for development and adults are no different. People start to unravel without them. If you work from home the onus is on you to create a framework and that is not as easy as it sounds. The distractions are legion, from the washing that becomes a point of fascination, to the walk to ‘get your head around something’ which transmorgifies into a shopping trip or lunch. The rituals and ceremonies of the office (even the process of getting there) provide the bends and curves in the day that keep us psychologically on the straight and narrow. I work very hard to inject structure into my days. I make a point of going to a public space for a portion of every day, thus mimicking the process described above. It keeps me sane.

 

Work expands to fit the time available.

 

Or more accurately, ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’, as Parkinson decreed. It should really be recognised as the official motto of the home worker. In the office shame-factors are at work and the close proximity of others makes it more likely that we will ‘get on with it’ because they can see if we’re not. 

I can also tell you that your backside and your gut will eventually expand to fit any garment available. You just don’t move as much when you’re at home and the absence of co-workers’ beady eyes means inevitable self-sanctioning of multiple dips into the Hob-Nobs, fridge, crisps or chocolate. One can easily get to the point when Pimms ‘O’ Clock is anytime you want it to be. Add to all of that the absence of the daily walks to the tube or rail station, or the cycle to work, or the stairways en route and on site and the general workout the office provides (even a beetle to your neighbour’s desk in your wheelie-chair, which, incidentally is great exercise) means the negation of the benefits of your morning gym session or run and hastens your introduction to elastic waistbands. 

A word about words.

Work alone for long enough and they stop flowing. If your only conversations, even for a couple of days, are with shopkeepers or yourself, you start to lose your voice both literally and figuratively because you’re not using it and the lack of interaction, intelligent or otherwise, means that your vocabulary suffers as a result. Words are increasingly likely to be found sitting on the tip of your tongue as you continue to spend more time sitting on your ar*e.

 

Falling between the craics.

 

The banter, the cliques, the gossip, the politics, the intrigues, it’s all important stuff. We all know that don’t we? I can tell you that if you’re a nobby-no-workmates the craic is what you miss the most. A beer on Skype on a Friday night is no substitute and never will be. People say that technology brings people together, that it makes you feel like you’re a room away. But it’s not true, because you’re always sending stuff somewhere else. The craic is about belonging, which promotes well-being, whereas home working promotes a sense of detachment and a dilution of one’s sense of proportion because we have no one to tell us we’re being stupid / wrong / rude / nice or a tw*t. You begin to understand that even the assholes you work with have a function.

 

Home alone. Over blown.

That’s what I think.

 

Yours, Nobby.