Work Daze

If you’ve been wishing and hoping that someday you’d be able to work from home, I have excellent news. According to Sue Shellenbarger, the Work & Family columnist for “The New York Times,” more companies are offering their employees the opportunity to go to work without actually going to work.

Imagine! Your daily commute stretches from your bedroom to your bedroom, the first being where you set up your Tempur-Pedic and where, as they say on MTV Cribs, the “magic happens” The second bedroom is where you set up your laptop and where “nothing happens,” mostly due to the wide screen Plasma TV you purchased with petty cash so you can do all your work while you watch All My Children.

Yes, working at home is the bomb! Not only can you work on your own schedule, but you can also not work on your own schedule. And you can not do it in your own pajamas! That’s right. Forget about spending a bundle on stylish new clothes, which are out of date the moment you arrive at the office. Nehru jackets are out? Who knew!

According to Shellenbarger, companies that are actively building a home-based work force include insurance companies like UnitedHealth Group and Safeco, financial giants like American Express, and technological powerhouses, including IBM and Sun Microsystems. These are not pyramid schemers, promising the stay-at-home worker the opportunity to make mega-bucks by badgering friends into buying organic soap suds or hawking vitamins L,O,S,E and R. These are real companies and real jobs – “full-time corporate jobs with benefits, available without the prerequisite of working for the company for a few years first.”

Get one of these out-of-the-office positions and you could stay on the payroll for decades, even if you do no work at all. In fact, it would be better to do no work! It significantly lessens the chances that anyone will know you’re employed.

The less than excellent news here is that the number of these dream jobs is limited. As the reporter puts it, “landing one often requires a serendipitous confluence of sought-after skills, experience, personal attributes and timing, along with a measure of luck.”

You also probably have to be a really focused individual with a sterling work ethic. In other words, the people who are most likely to be hired as home-based workers are exactly the people who won’t appreciate the opportunity to goof off in comfort.

The reasons for the rise in out-of-the-office office jobs include improvements in mobile-office technology and a drive to cut real estate costs. Companies have realized that it’s cheaper to wire their employees than a whole floor of an office complex. Your employer also saves money by not providing you a parking space, or an Aeron chair, or your daily dose of a coffee-like substance. You gain because Uncle Sam allows you to write off the part of your house that you use as an office, providing your company does not offer you a cube to use, and insists that you work from home. [Of course, when you sell your house, you may have to give Uncle a share of your profits, but let’s face facts, the government needs the money more than you do.]

Workers in hot professions are the most likely to be offered the work-at-home perk. Shellenbarger lists computer technicians, financial analysts, marketing managers, software engineers and nurses as current targets for bathrobe-based opportunities. While I can understand why computer jockeys could output anywhere there’s an outlet, I’m not sure I see exactly what a nurse could do from home – call patients at 5 AM to check that they’re sleeping well? Prescribe Lamaze breathing techniques to help the ill and injured get over the pain of seeing their hospital bills? The possibilities are endless.

One hot profession perfect for working from home is the executive recruiter. Chances are, if some headhunter is pestering you to take a horrible job in a miserable office, they’re probably doing it from their hot tub.

One tip provided by a UnitedHealth recruiter, Tom Valerius, suggests that you take care in crafting the reason you give for wanting to work at home. “If you say ‘I need to let my dog out,” he says, “it’s not going to work.” This seems completely reasonable to me. My pet Pomeranian could do my job much better than I can. If I hired me, I’d definitely want Pookie in the office from 9 to 5.