The Joys of Working at Home If there was ever a perfect place for staying home to work, it’s here. I know a lot of people in Crestline who work from home. Some of these people have employers who are enlightened enough to allow them to work from home, or they are “self-employed.” I’ve done both on and off, and sometimes a combination of the two, since moving to Crestline. First, let’s start with the “self-employed.” I put that in quotes for a reason. If you’re talking with someone who’s self-employed, they’ll usually smile and say the best thing about it is the “flexible hours.” When they say this, look closely at how bloodshot their eyes are. Then set your alarm for 4:30 on Saturday morning and call the work phone they’ve installed in their home. Chances are they’ll pick up in one ring. If they send you an e-mail bragging about it and rubbing it in, look at the time/date stamp—chances are it’s written sometime after all of the vampires have called it a night. That’s what the self-employed call “flexible hours.” You see, while you have flexible hours, your clients don’t—they work 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. But you have the freedom to work any time you want—right? I used to create Web pages for clients of an advertising agency. The agency got all of the content from the client, made it look pretty, got back to the client, made changes, got final approval from the client, then unloaded a bunch of art and text to me via e-mail. It was my job to cut up all of the art and content, make navigational sense of it all, edit everything, put text together with art, then create all of the pages, forms and navigational elements and make them all work. From Monday through Friday, I twiddled my thumbs while the client and the agency were doing their parts on the Web site. Invariably, at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, I would start getting calls and faxes and 50 e-mails like this: “No, e-mail 11 with attachment 15 is wrong. Here’s e-mail 12 with attachment 16. That’s the right one. Make sure you use this one and not attachment 13.” Huh? By 4:52 p.m. I have all of my questions and concerns together, so I give the agency a call. All I get is voicemail. I could almost hear my message echoing down their empty halls. The first time I did a Web site for them I made the mistake of pretending I was a regular employee in a regular job, just like them. Since it was late Friday and I still had questions before I could proceed, I put the materials aside, had a picnic with the kids on Saturday, went for a drive on Sunday, then called the agency the first thing on Monday morning with my questions. “WHAT! You haven’t started on it!? You mean it’s not already DONE!?” This is flexible hours for the self-employed—when the clients leave on Friday at 4:50 p.m. for their leisurely weekend and dump the 800 man-hours of work all of those people did during the week on me, it’s up to me to figure out how I’m going to cram 42 hours of work into the 63 hours that are left until Monday at 8:00 a.m. when people start screaming at me on the phone. Then there is the little fact that there are three nights in there in which I should probably set aside a few hours for sleep. Then also, I have to deal with my real life—kids wanting to go swimming and friends who want to do things. Of course, to save face, my story to my working stiff buddies who want to go hiking or something on Saturday is that I have to work this weekend to make up for the whole week I decided to take off, because, unlike these poor guys, I’m “self employed” and I have “flexible hours.” Here is a word of caution: If you are one of the people who has an employer who lets you work at home, make sure you have a separate work phone tucked away in an office, or with a quiet ringer. And never, ever let the employer get into the habit of calling your home phone number. I had a boss who would call and say things like: “Lee, you know, I’ve been tossing and turning for the past three hours trying to get to sleep, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said today about that promo brochure. Could you go down to your office and pull that up on the screen?” So we’ll call them “odd hours.” When the school year starts there are some benefits to having these odd hours. Every day I get to take my daughter to school and pick her up at Lake Gregory Elementary. As a guy, I’m truly in the minority at pick-up time at the school. So while I wait I sit and talk about the weather and shopping or gossip a little with the moms, and then I maybe stop off at the Oak Trunk to help my daughter pick out another charm for her bracelet, do some shopping at Goodwin’s and then I go home, put my apron on and start getting dinner ready. After years of doing this, like Dr. Laura, I can proudly say, “I am my kid’s mom." On hot summer days, I can take the whole afternoon off and go swimming at the lake with the kids, while all of those other people are cooped up in their offices, because my employer lets me work at home and I have flexible hours. I neglect to mention that when the sun is coming up on the East Coast the next morning, I’ll probably just be getting to bed. So my hat is off to all of the many self-employed and home-employed people of Crestline. I share your joy and I feel your pain. This Sunday, the heck with it— I’m taking the whole day off and I’m going to take my son to Legoland. Man, am I ever going to pay for that. |
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