What I Learned Through Telecommuting

After being stuck in your house for a year, typing on the keyboard, double-checking emojis before clicking “send”: telecommuting gets old!

The best way to describe telecommuting is watching “The Shinning”, a movie about a guy who becomes a caretaker of a haunted hotel over the winter and brings his family with him.

At the beginning of the movie, things are great. He gets some writing done, the family is adjusting, and life is wonderful. But, the longer he is at the hotel, the more reality slips away. Starts typing phrases into the typewriter over and over again. No contact with others except his family. Eventually, the whole thing goes south, and loses his shit with an ax through a garden labyrinth, looking for his son, “HEEEERRREEEE’SSSS JJJOOOHHHNNNYYYY !!!!!”

Working at home for the last year is exactly (well not exactly … my family is alive and I am not running around with an ax). In the beginning, I was focused on the benefits of telecommuting: less gas, and less wear on the car. Everyone worked over Teams, Zoom, Meet, or and accomplished the work. I got the see the family more as they went to virtual school. My wife liked the fact that I cooked dinner by the time she came home. The laundry was clean. The dog didn’t see the inside of a crate for a year. Life is good.

Then, a few months in, you get tired of the virtual water cooler and miss .. well … the real water cooler to talk around. With the kids at online school, and my load of housework increasing, I felt like I was doing three jobs at the same time. I couldn’t focus my full attention on any one of them. After a while, becoming distracted was a way of life, putting in the time at work and (since there was no more commuting) my days became longer.

The bottom line is the fact that telecommuting is great in the beginning. Working in your house, getting things done, not driving everywhere, is awesome. But after a while, it would be nice to walk into a store without a mask, or worry every time you go food shopping that you might pick up “the virus”. Enough is enough. Now is the time we have to band together, get the shot, leave the labyrinth, and return life back to normal.