I have the tremendous pleasure of working from home nearly 100% of the time.
Many of you are no doubt thinking that is a better deal than a person could ever hope for in a job. You may think of all the laundry you could get caught up on or the convenience of getting mail to the the post office. Or even the time spent with your kids.
Let me disabuse you of that notion right off.
Because of my dedication to getting tasks done instead of getting 8 hours in, I no longer posses the ability to distinguish between work time and my time. When I get out of bed I flip on the computer and get to work. When I finish dinner I like to just check on my email. Hours later I finally realize its time for bed.
The best I have been able to come up with to avoid over work–days loneger than 10 hours–is to stay asleep longer. I used to start at 6 AM to get a head start on the day (answer emails, tidy up the losse ends from the night before) but I discovered that I just ended up working from 6 to 6. So now I sleep in till 7:30 or so and start at 8. Which conveniently shaves 2 hours off my work day. Nothing else changed though.
As a result, I now don’t feel as much like a morning person as I used to be. As I like to be.
For years I was up at 4:45, on the road by 5, and in the office before 6. It amused me to be able to call folks in Boston and have them still not at their desks.
In order to maintain the pretense of having an office, co-workers, and a real job, I go into the office once a week (promise to go in once a week, but it’s not a religeous effort) on Thursdays. This week the alarm went off at 5:15 with a built in plan to snooze till 5:25. Getting up this early I can get to the office before most of the traffic sets in but after the security guard arrives. There is an electronic keycard gate so the guard is superflous for my needs, but I am not trying to prove anything by getting there before him. Plus, he throws out a fresh sounding “Good morning.” to me that kicks off an otherwise useless day.
Well, the Wife slept badly and ended up throwing the White Cat on the floor. The White Cat replied by sleeping between the two of us instead of on her face. As if in concert, the Black Cat decided to sleep on my edge of the bed at about waist level. From here he can get a bit of a scratching, but it just far enough to make me work for it–he’s passive aggressive that way. He rarely ever sleeps in that part of the bed. Normally it’s crotch to feet to middle of bed at the foot. Generally I help him skip straight to the preferred spot (preferred by humans) before I go to sleep. Otherwise there is a bit of midnight cat launching that occurs. It surprises me that he hasn’t figured out that sleeping on my feet is dangerous.
While not Egyptians cutting away our expensive royal purple gowns so as not to disturb the sleeping cat, we do like to think of the cats (especially the Black Cat) as honoring us with their cuddliness when they sleep on our laps and impede our getting out of bed, getting up to let the dogs out/in, or getting up in general. If one of us mentions ice-cream while watching TV, no matter who it is, if there is a cat on your lap you’re not the one to have to go get the dessert. Same goes for remote controls that have wandered out of a lazy man’s reach and, again, the dogs.
So with the cat in position 5:25 becomes 5:35 and then 5:45. Two snoozes later I get out of bed, let the dogs out, start the car, get dressed, let the dogs back in, and leave.
On the way into work I get to a snow covered section just in time to see the jaws of life being used to open a car door. And I all I can think is how it must have sucked to sit there in the freezing cold and snow bleeding onto the dashboard for 20 minutes waiting for the ambulance to arrive.