Let us discuss then the various and sundry ways that working out of your house can be a descent into madness.
I’ve been working from my home for about five years now. I’m lucky enough to have a small dedicated office (shared with The Duchess, but she’s not home during the day, so normally the room is mine to be naked and drunk in. I mean, write novels in. Novels. Me, writing. Not dancing around naked with a bottle of whiskey in my paw. Never in life.
Anyways, working from home is a strange challenge, even assuming you don’t have more cats than is healthy sitting on your desk and your lap and your head. We currently have five cats. Sweet lord, five cats. That’s the subject of a whole different post, though.
There are, of course, the usual and obvious pitfalls of a work-from-home lifestyle: The lack of grooming or proper dress code, the slow erosion of social conventions. The urge to just sit and eat and get drunk at two in the afternoon. Well, drunker. But I’m not here to tell you about the usual pitfalls of working from home. There’s much weirder stuff going on.
Some people can’t work from home, or so they tell me. Some people need the routine, the schedule, the contact with their fellow humans. Not me. First of all, I am an obsessive person – I make my own routine wherever I go. I don’t need corporate routines handed to me, baby. Second, I hate people. All of you. The day they told me I should go work at home with the cats, I was delighted, because cats don’t try to talk to me. Not when I’m sober, at least, and when it happens after a bottle of decent bourbon I am usually well aware it’s just alcohol poisoning.
But working from home will make you hyper-aware of your surroundings. You think you know your house? Your office? Your bedroom? Wherever you end up working, you will become a small god of that space. You will know everything there is to know about it. Every pore in the wood, every scuff on the wall, every sound of your next door neighbor. My next door neighbor wakes up every day at noon and plays Somebody I Used to Know by Gotye. Every day. Every. Day. I have no idea what’s going on in his life, but I can guess, because I work from home and I am a god in this small space.
My grooming has, in fact, fallen off. Which is saying something, as it was never very high to begin with. Shaving is a foreign experience for me, and when I am forced to shave due to polite societal requirements, I end up with an angry red razor burn in place of my beard. And I do tend to walk about the place naked, because, really, who am I dressing for? Cats? They don’t care. The UPS guys? he never looks at me, always turning his face away when I sign for things, so obviously that’s not a problem. Besides, I’m god in this space. I work from home. YOU CANNOT DEFEAT ME IN THIS OFFICE, I HAVE SUPERPOWERS.
One thing about working from home: It’s an advantage for writing, because every day looks exactly the same, so you never get distracted. Commuting, or going to a new location every day engages your mind with novelty and you end up sitting there making observations and learning new facts about the world around you, which is just wasted time. I see exactly the same things all the time here, and thus I get a lot of writing done, because my brain literally has nothing else to do.
It’s not for the faint of heart, no. But if you have ever dreamed of purchasing a super hero costume and wearing it to ‘work’, working from home is your chance. Or so I’ve heard.
Liquor bottles, assemble!