The Joys of WFHing... and the flip side

7" edit: It dawned on me that I only get off my property to go running and to go to church. So I thought I’d write about that and the fact I work from home. On the whole WFH suits me but I probably do need to get out a little bit more outside of the 4:40-7:40 weekday window and weekend mornings. That is all there is to it, really. But if you want the Box Set of thoughts, warbles and reasons, you can find it below.

Wow… it really has been a while… sorry!

Well, sort of sorry, anyway – I’ve been reyt busy, tha knooes! Two of the things I do to warrant a bank transfer heading into my account on the last Friday of each month is organise conferences as well as coordinate my company’s participation at third party events. I’ve got five of them between next week and mid-April, my key focus being one I’m running in Nice in under a fortnight. So yes… kinda busy.

Does this mean I haven’t the time for conversations around the watercooler? Or that I’m heading into and out of the office all stressed out?

Well, no… because…

…because that’s not the environment in which I work anyway. And that’s really what I want to talk about today. See, I WFM. I’m a proper little WFMer.

That’s right: I work from home. Every day I head up the stairs after breakfast and emerge from  my 3m x 2m (I guesstimate) cubicle some eight and a half hours or so later. In between I read a lot of e-mails, write a fair few myself (but shorter than you may fear – it’s something I’ve worked on!) and create a lot of things whose names invariably end in .xlsx, .docx or .pptx. You know, like gos_weightrecord.xlsx, notabouttherunning_0.1.docx or gos_2014racecalendar_1.2.pptx… but about Service Lifecycle Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Management and… stuff.

Now, working from home is great. It means I can schedule my morning runs without having to factor in a commute. It means I don’t have to worry about where I’ll be when arranging for deliveries or technician visits. It means I’m generally home whenever The Boys are, even if potentially on the phone to far-flung places.

I’ve been working from home, in some shape or form, since 1999, when I somehow ended up in the West Country. I only came down for a weekend, and that was 5,207 days ago… but you’ve heard that one, right?

I moved out here to help set up a new office, which by extension means I had no office to instantly move into. I’d agreed to move down at some point, not to stay ad infinitum after coming here for a Halloween party where my boss asked me if I could stay and help him out “for a few days”… but there you go. There I was. Here I am. Given ‘there’ was Slough, I cannot really grumble: this is still an upgrade, at least it is for me. To the best of my knowledge, no poet laureate has advocated bombing Portishead as Mr Betjeman did with… you know…

1999 – how I remember those days!

Days when you checked e-mail once an hour, carefully taking your laptop to the phone socket, plugging in and checking the progress of that 1Mb slide deck you’d had the audacity to send, hoping and praying the connection wouldn’t drop… what a rock and roll way to spend an hour!

Back then, working from home was a reflection of the nature of the business: for “set up a new office”, read “work from home whilst scouring local area for a cheap location”. Then, a couple of employers later, I had my first seizure in a decade. This meant I had to surrender my licence, making homeworking extremely appealing. It wasn’t an option at first: my job required me to be in the office every day so lifts were a necessity. My next job was in That London: I’d head East on the Monday, back on the Wednesday and work the last two days from home. Again, that was a start-up, so human interaction and team-building were key. That and ADSL still hadn’t been commoditised – it was circa 2004, after all…

…but this is 2014 – and I can download a video faster than when I started working from home I could send a text file! My phone is more powerfun than the computers that many people think helped man get on the moon! One day I will have to outline to my Boys a time when you couldn’t just rewind CBeebies, when you couldn’t look up YouTube clips at bedtime (the last ones were of gorillas), when… well, you know. When.

Until twelve months or so ago, I worked for a company with around forty employees in Europe and another four-hundred globally. Within Europe, you knew what everybody was doing, and to a large extent could lend a hand or at least an ear. I had a direct connection with the few but large software deals that we were working on and felt a personal stake in them. Not least because, for a company of our size, a single deal could make the difference between bonus and no bonus, between still having a job and joining the queue… real-world “Deal Or No Deal” stuff. So being in the office and chewing the fat (in the shape of a bacon-and-egg sarnie from a local layby greasy spoon) with some of “The Guys” was rewarding in more than the calorific sense…

That was then. Our company was taken over just over a year ago and I’m now one of hundreds in Europe and (four) thousand globally. This development came with strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats… but it certainly did away with that sense of connection with everything that’s going on, because there’s just too much of it to be any other way. Ironically, though, I’m still the only UK-based marketer: the colleagues with whom I deal on a daily basis are in France, Sweden, Germany and the US. And, quite frankly, it makes little difference to them whether I’m fifteen miles along the M5 or not…

So far, so logical. Think about it on a one-day basis and it’s bliss: get up, run, pack the boys off to school, work, come downstairs, spend time with them and then let the late afternoon merge into the evening in front of the sofa with Mrs S. No traffic delays, no worrying about getting home in time… for a father of two littl’uns who cannot drive, that is one of those things that reminds me that, actually, modern life is not rubbish. It’s not perfect, but is sure has its perks.

Now, here’s the thing. There are times when I become that little more aware that, on most weeks, I only get out of our estate when I go running and when I go to church. Other than that, I don’t make it onto the main road…

…see, when I read that back it doesn’t have quite the same “Awww! Bliss!” factor. More, if anything, “Oh… Bless!”. It reminds me of a school trip to the Certosa di Pavia, a monk monastery in Northern Italy… it makes me stop and wonder why I’m not getting out more… but I have an answer to that. Of course I have.

Mondays, Mrs S does Guides and is out in the evening; Tuesdays, Mrs S does Brownies, so is out in the evening; Wednesdays, Big’Un goes to Beavers, so Mrs S has to drive him there and pick him up; Thursdays and Fridays, we just…
…well, we stay in. Why wouldn’t we? And then there’s the weekend… well, we don’t socialise regularly with any of the Young’Uns’ friends’ families, so unless we’re taking them somewhere we’ll probably stay here. Maybe cross the road to the field. And if they do have birthday parties to go to (or, as is the case with Big’Un, swimming lessons on Saturday mornings), Mrs S will do the honours. She can drive, see. I don’t mind running 1.7mi to the nearest supermarket and back to save her the hassle of getting in the car, but a 12-mi return trip with Big’Un and his gear on my shoulders… look, I wish I could, but I just can’t!

Back to WFMing, it also has both positives and negatives in terms of family dynamics. On the one hand it’s great to know what time I’ll be at the table for tea, that traffic won’t get in the way of my seeing The Boys. On the other, it’s easy to forget I am actually working here, putting in shifts to pay the mortgage, the bills, the food… Don’t get me wrong: I never forget, but it has been known for others to do so. I may have once asked what might happen if I stepped into a classroom during school hours asking for a favour but I’m not sure I ever did get a response… And yes, on those occasional lapses in harmonious marital bliss it would be nice to have some space rather than being constantly under the same roof: but that’ll sort itself out when Karen realises her dream of returning to work…

Only today I upset Littl’Un by telling him I was busy and couldn’t play with him while Mrs S had gone to pick up Big’Un from after-school Football Club. I won’t deny it: at that specific moment I wished I was in some anonymous concrete office block, undisturbed by humankind and by the feeling of guilt engendered by turning down my kid. Because I did want to play with him – but that spreadsheet had to take precedence! Maybe I should rent a small shoebox somewhere… or try and buy a small house somewhere and keep a room to myself whilst renting out the rest… maybe in Sheffield? Hmmm… not sure I’m approaching this dilemma from the right angle. Which is not to say I’m not reaching the right conclusion, mind. Anyway – moving (swiftly) on…

There we are. Am I moaning or just stating facts?

I’ll be honest: I don’t know. On the one hand I know that I am not the liveliest of social animals and can happily sit on the sofa and blog away listening to Joe D’Urso. As irony would have it, he’s now singing ‘All My Friends’, describing that middle-aged scenario where you don’t get out as much as you used to because of family commitments… but then Joe, who lives in Noo Joisey, regularly tours Italy, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands… he’s got it sorted.

So, that was one hand… on the other…

…I know that if I were in Santa Margherita or Sheffield I would get out. I’d call Matteo and we’d meet at Chiavari Train Station at 9pm, or I’d walk up to The Hammer (occasionally with Pincers) at 6pm of a Saturday knowing Uncle Rog, Uncle Tim, Streetsy, Jonah, Sooty et al would be there. So why don’t I do something similar here?

One reason is simple: I live here. I’m not on holiday. I’ve not got that rare opportunity to meet up with long-time friends and kick off sentences with “Do you remember when we…”, as per my musings over a year ago. Would I head up to The Hammer every Saturday? Or would life get in the way? The latter is quite likely, at least where impeccable weekly participation is concerned. But I know I’d at least want to go. Here… I’m alreyt, thanks. Or am I?

Another reason is equally simple: I’m not on holiday. Part two: I’ve typically got work ‘tomorrow’. Now granted, I don’t have to drive there and I can easily get there by 9am. But it’s still a factor…

…as is the fact that, quite frankly, I don’t have that many friends here. I know people, sure: but ‘friendship’ is a word that means a lot to me and one that I therefore deploy with caution. And what friendships I did built in my first few years here, swinging the willow with hapless enthusiasm, were with people who now generally face similar challenges in terms of getting out on school nights, neither of us needing each other’s company enough to make an effort beyond the routine. But I’m too old to forge friendships without starting from a solid foundation of things that truly matter to me, say Springsteen or running. I might bump into a Springsteen-lovin’ runner out there before dawn at some point, but I haven’t yet… and not for want of trying!

And what about this here Interweb thingy? Does it have some shame to shoulder (and try to not read that with a Dutch accent)?

I reckon it does. Because social media helps me keep in touch without getting out of the door. I can chat away to my running friends, who call me Gia. I can text my cricket pals, who call me Giaco. I can reach out to my old football friends in Italy, who may call me Giacci. And that’s without forgetting the rest of them, most of whom will go for Giac. My friendships are at the same time all simultaneously accessible and yet neatly compartmentalised, by sport / history / geography… Besides, I’ve always said that, whilst something like Facebook is great to keep in touch with friends in Italy, France or North America (both sides of the 49th), the minute I start using it to keep in touch with friends who live in the same town as I do I have a problem.

And running? What about running?

Well, of course, it has an impact. These days it impacts most things I do and do not do, and my social life is no exception. That’s not to say it prevents me from doing stuff, just that it impacts it: fortunately I am able to schedule running around everything else and not the other way round. But I don’t deny, for example, that I have a serious drinking problem: I exercise too much and don’t drink enough. Alcohol, that is. Monday to Friday, my alarm is generally set for 04:44, 06:06, 05:35, 05:35 and 06:06: that takes some of the shine off late-night drinking sessions… not that I ever was a heavy drinker, what with taking medication every day of my life with the warning “Avoid alcohol” on it. And then there’s the weekend… but where am I going to go of a Friday or Saturday night? “Stella”’s back on Fridays, and Saturdays… oh I don’t know.

Still, I’m not moaning about running – at least it gets me out of the house!

Every single day, come rain or shine. I will generally awake before the alarm, turn it off to avoid disturbing Mrs S, and lie there: not necessarily keen to get up but knowing that lying there ain’t gonna get me my sub-90’ HM, my sub-3:30’ mara or my finish line at the Highland Fling… and, most importantly, that I do all of this not for today but for my older years, in the hope I’ll reach them in a form befitting of all my elders whose latter years I’ve been blessed enough to witness. And at least most mornings I see David and maybe even Mike. They’re the guys I’ll see on their way to or fro the newsagents (well, Tesco these days): heck, we even exchanged Christmas cards last month! They were the two guys I could think of that I regularly saw outside of my family life: they got a card and duly reciprocated! Mike’s, in particular, was really beautiful: it miraculously survived the post-holiday recycling cull…

  

My favourite cards are the unexpected ones,
both in terms of sender and content...
this one won hands down in 2013!

…so yes, on my runs I see familiar faces, even though I couldn’t give you any more names. But that’s not where the social side of running ends for me. Nor does it continue with group runs, I grant you – that, again, is down to the timing of my excursions, otherwise I’d see more of Tim and indeed Simon. But occasionally it does get me to far-out places like…

…Manchester…

…Sheffield…

…Buxton…

…Chester…

…and yes, I don’t race just for the sake of covering anything between 3.1 and 40 (53?) miles. Just like Springsteen concerts are not just about the gigs themselves. Otherwise I’d just run around here and then put on a DVD…

…races are a communal experience. Yes, you’ve got your own goal and you religiously check your watch the way of a Sunday morning you (OK, I) might check the bread at communion. But you can still share the feelings of those around you: you can empathise with their journey, the steps they took to get there, why this matters to them. Just as you can with the runners. And all the better if you can see them in attractive surroundings to add to the whole experience. Failing that, a Holiday Inn in a business area of Chester will do nicely.

As for the long-term… what’s the race plan, Squintani?

I don’t know. I plan to try going into my company’s Aztec West office, for sure – three motorway junctions (and a helluvalotoftraffic, what with it being on a business park) down the road. My colleague Alex keeps offering me lifts and I do feel I need to give it a shot. Right now I’m too busy to disrupt the routine and find myself stuck in traffic on the M5. Besides, on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday it would displease Mrs S, who needs to go out, whereas on a Friday the M5 traffic represents a risk that I have no intention of taking out of anything other than necessity. Thursdays, maybe? In order to have a chat by the watercooler? Or put t’kettle on?

Let’s see. The fridge has a small compartment for water and our kettle does as good a job as kettles can in this land of hard water. So I’m going to need another reason to go in. Some semblance of humanity? Hmmm… that might just about do it. And I’ve stopped looking at coffee machines: I don’t drink enough of the stuff. That and we have a kettle and I’m tight – I peeped again this morning and those prices have yet to crash..!

By the way – this post has taken a while to write, purely because I’ve been reyt busy. Well, that and it’s inordinately long. Halfway through I did meet up with Bachey and some other happy chappies at the pub. Two orangeandlemonades, two games of darts. Bath Half Marathon just over a month away… my sub-90’ quest is going to be very tough, but if I’m going to fail (an outcome to which all logic currently points) I don’t want to find myself looking back in anger at that one pint too many at The Ship…

So – is WFMing really great?

It’s like most batteries in life: there are positives and negatives. On the whole, it works for me. There is, of course, a flip side, but I’ve not (totally) flipped yet. Which is not to say this routine can’t be improved upon. As I was saying not that long ago about my training routine: and I think that’s got better over the past week or so…

…oh, and if you do commute, or travel, don’t knock those miles – however you may cover them. They actually provide a useful cooling off, unwinding, readjusting break between office mode and family mode. More so than a flight of stairs, that’s for sure. Much as I make a point of changing my shirt (!) when the working day is over (and, working from home and gifted with my sense of fashion, the difference is not dramatic), a few miles would do a better job. Just… not too many. Too many miles is never good.