The View from Up Here

Working from home. 

I guess most of you have seen the online video of a guy being interviewed on television and suddenly through a door behind him, his two children consecutively launch an invasion on his study. If you haven’t, just Google “Working from Home Funny Video”.  

The funny part is not the children themselves, it’s that the guy is such a pompous ass he tries to simply push the first kid off screen, backwards while continuing the interview. Only now he’s fully off topic. Then the baby follows in one of those miniature Dalek-like walker frames on a mission to exterminate anything not nailed down, with the wife (or nanny?) scrambling frantically behind. It’s almost as if it’s staged but it’s not. She’s probably also been trying to cook the dinner. Hence the momentary lapse in knowledge of the children’s whereabouts. Though who’s actually doing all the work in that house? 

Working from home has suddenly become an overnight reality for those of us fortunate enough to still have a job. Despite the attraction of not having to negotiate traffic, the joy of not having to associate with that colleague who you’d normally avoid like the, er plague and the luxury of not having to shave, trim your nostril hairs and/or apply make-up, it’s actually fraught with unforeseen pitfalls.

I should know. I’ve been working from home for two and a half days now, if you don’t count the weekend. Though the line between weekend and weekday when you are working from home is now somewhat blurred. Boundaries are there to be crossed. Your supervisor / boss now takes it upon him/herself to check up on you. Regularly. Even though the proximity of the main bedroom is tempting, you cannot have an afternoon nap, like you would on a Saturday and/or Sunday.   

The work space has now fully invaded your home. The inadequacies of your phone line and internet connection come into play and cause you to keep getting cut out of important teleconferenced conversations. The bottle of gin leers down at you from about 2 pm onwards and seeing as your partner is still at their real place of work, there’s dinner to prepare and the breakfast things are still in the sink. 

It was Karl Marx who said that capitalism is a system that alienates the masses. So working from home is doubly alienating. There’s no one around but you! Being an introvert I thought I’d love it. Though there’s something not quite right about getting up and going to work in the spare room. It’s like the current state of American politics. No one knows how it’s going to work out. And from what I’ve seen so far of Trump, his cronies and his antipodean clone Scomo, it’s possibly not going to be pretty. Or was that probably?    

Paul Saxby 

Ferny Hills, Qld