To commute or not to commute - for that is the question

What are the benefits of working from home? What makes it different from working in an office environment? Is it that moment of irate and carbolic fury upon the discovery that your crucial delivery deadline is likely to be stalled by the idiocies of your broadband provider, who naturally cannot be reached other than via a longwinded call centre in India?

And as charming as the young lady is in her endeavours to assist you, your fury is only increased when she informs you how wonderful the weather is at her location in comparison to how foul and cold it is at yours.

Or is it that moment when your oldest child decides to go cross-eyed, spurt quantities of blood from her nostrils and promptly passes out in a flopping backward motion across your dressing table whilst trying to explain, ‘Mummy, I don’t feel very well’.

Of course, had I been working in an office, after a two-hour commute through the lightly snow-covered excuse for a railway infrastructure, I would have arrived to find that our internal network was down due to a scheduled upgrade the previous evening and to be told by the IT support fascist that of course all my files would be safe and that the system would be up and running in the near future. The word future conjuring up decades of delay rather than minutes.

Then there is the moment when the spotty IT geek goes a slight shade of pale, gulps, apologises for the inconvenience whilst whispering on his mobile phone to his supervisor, smiles, and departs rapidly. Needless to say the network revives itself after four hours to which my workstation looks remarkably clear of the clutter that usually is strewn across the screen.

This would seem a bonus if the same did not apply to the ‘My Documents’ folder. Upon contacting the IT department as to where my files are, a quiet all-pervading silence is their only response and ‘We are working on it’ before the phone is put down.

At which point my daughter’s school has finally got through to me and the first lines of the school nurse, ‘Ah, Mrs Player, it’s so good we’ve been able to reach you. We have a slight problem, we believe that your daughter might be carrying a bug and we therefore would be grateful if you could remove her from our establishment as we wish her not to infect the rest of the school.’

The realisation that my workday has now just been cut in half at the cost of half a day’s leave and the damage to my professional reputation due to a lack of deliverance on commitments due to a combination of circumstances out of my control dawns on me like the resounding thud of an unwanted tax bill.

All of this is topped by the scintillating garnish if another commute back home.

Rewind, phew, that could have been my day, but it wasn’t, for my partner and I work from home developing a site for people who work from home or anywhere (www.atworkanywhere.com).

My daughter did pass out with blood spurting from her nose (she’s OK now), but my husband was able to accompany her to hospital for a check-up while I laboured in peace curled up under my warm duvet.

I did experience problems with my internet, but fortunately didn’t lose any work or miss any deadlines as the issue turned out to be a minor inconvenience caused by an OS upgrade conflicting with our router which did not affect Vista but crashed XP.

After completing my daily quota, I cuddled up with my oldest daughter on the sofa, lit the fire and watched some dubious TV. About to go out training now and tomorrow is another day and another dollar. I think the benefits of working at home outweigh the considerable tribulations of working in an office, despite days like this.