Momentum

Working from home has multiple advantages:

• You don't have to drive, therefore saving money and conserving the Earth's natural resources. (But mostly saving money.)


• You can wear shorts, go barefoot, and use "Leave it to Beaver" as your background accompanyment...thus assuring that you stay properly motivated.
  
• You have continual access to food and drink without being restricted by cafeteria offerings and limited vending machine selections.
  
• If you run into a decision-making challenge, a complex prioritization issue, or an ethical dilemma, you can always get help from Ward Cleaver.

But there are some disadvantages, too. For example, there are the computer gyrations you have to perform to be able to log onto the office network and get to the data you need. And the fact that your computer gets hosed up by the tech support weenies. And then there's that temptation to take advantage of the continual access to food and drink...

When my car went belly-up, I decided to try to work from home rather than deal with the hassles of arranging alternate transportation to the office. I was overly optimistic, interpreting the mechanic's "we gotta pull the engine" as "it might take an entire day", rather than the more accurate "you're looking at repairs involving quantum particle physics, chaos theory, and post-Einsteinian time dilation—heck, the paperwork alone will take 3 freakin' days!" So I stayed home, expecting that any moment the phone would ring with the "we're all finished and it's running great" message.

I didn't get a lot done.

If any of my bosses are reading this, please note that my inefficiency was totally due to anxiety over my car, and in no way indicates problems with the general idea of telecommuting. Just because I spent more time eating nachos and Junior Mints than formatting report documents doesn't mean that I couldn't work effectively from home on a daily basis. After all, being locked away in the Engineering building basement effectively isolates me from my coworkers anyway -- there's no need for me to be physically present at the office to do my work.

Well, except for the fact that my computer works better from there. I did have trouble getting into the company network from home, so I called the tech support folks. Quite friendly, they are, but somewhat hampered by the fact that people's home computers may be set up quite differently from the office machines. By talking to the support technician, I learned that my virus checker and firewall were probably to blame for my inability to connect, and that I needed to shut them down. (Aren't they important? Well, yeah, I think they are...but what're ya gonna do?)

My javascript was running correctly, either, according to the disembodied voice I listened to during our two-hour call. Using NetMeeting, he took control of my computer and went to a web page to download...something. He didn't really explain what he was doing, but I got to watch several progress bars slowly creep across the screen as my cursor went into semi-permanent hourglass mode.

I will say this, the fellow was quite apologetic when we discovered that his attempt to update my javascript seems to have permanently hosed up many of the computer functions that I take for granted. Want to order something from Amazon? Sorry. Want to see movies listings for your local theaters, or catch a current weather report? Uh, sorry about that, too.

I rode my bike into work the next day. I stopped by to check on my car during the ride home and was told that the engine was in tiny little pieces all over the shop floor, and since they were closed on the 4th of July, it wouldn't be ready until Saturday. Sigh. And because they would have to bring in Stephen Hawking, Lee Iococca, and the ghost of Yoda to consult on how to reassemble it, it was going to cost me several months' salary before they were done.

Oh well, at least the extra bike riding would do me some good. Right? Might as well just kick back and enjoy the 4th of July. I hope you do, too.

Have a great day!