Home is where the work is

19 March 2020

Overnight, my workplace has doubled in size. This once quiet space, filled with just the click-clacking of a keyboard and the occasional waft of classical music, now rumbles with the sound of my husband’s voice. He goes from one call to the next, discussing spreadsheets and renewals, holding conference calls and informal chats and performance reviews.

‘I’m not sure I like this new open plan office,’ I complain to him in semi-jest, surveying the home office of which I’m usually the only occupant.

He laughs. Then, ‘Hang on,’ he says, excusing himself from the brief conversation. ‘I’ve got another call coming in.’

My husband isn’t the loud or extroverted type. But the closure of his office due to the COVID-19 pandemic and his decamping into our modest home office with mirrored desks — mine facing this wall, his facing that — has revealed to me another side of him, the one he’s forced to expose in his workplace, in the cut and thrust of corporate duties and office politics.

It’s a reminder to me of what I’m not missing. With a few office-based diversions along the way, I’ve worked from home for more than 25 years. Where my reserved husband has been forced to operate in a large office, putting voice to thoughts and opinions he’d often prefer to keep private, I’ve had to temper my gregarious, ever-opinionated nature in my office for one. I’ve spent hours and days and years working alone, tapping out stories on my keyboard, editing publications, processing photographs, writing speeches and tackling the tedious administrative tasks of a sole trader.

It hasn’t been pure exile, of course: as a freelance journalist and travel writer my work has been punctuated with engagement with the people and places I write about. And even in the office, where the real work is done, there is contact with humans, with the people I interview over the telephone and the conference calls I hook into and the long chats I have with editors and colleagues — exchanges that have reinforced for me the truism that physical togetherness isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for collaboration and solid output.

'But the work itself must be done; there can be no lounging in bed until midday or sneaking off to the movies — as much of the world’s workforce (at least those lucky enough to still have their jobs) will soon discover.'

In the early years of working

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Home is where the work is

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