Working from Home > Reviews > No Christmas Party Shenanigans

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	no commuting, convenience, you can set your own hours
Disadvantages:	lack of contact with others, no jollies

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Working from Morgenhund Towers in the centre of Vienna has proved to be a very interesting experience, and although I have earned my keep for the last six months purely by sitting at my desk and translating, writing articles for magazines, evaluating software and sorting out sponsorship deals for various causes, I still long for an office job.

Let’s face it, whilst I don’t have hellish times commuting across a large city at rush-hour (I admit that Vienna’s rush-hour is not as bad as London’s) the fact that I only have to fall out of bed to hit the on switch of my computer and climb into the chair to be “at work” is not quite as great as it sounds.

Firstly, working from home is only possible thanks to the marvels of modern technology. I have a permanent net connection, which allows me to send documents across town to people, so I can work via the net, and indeed a lot of my translation work comes over the ‘Net from foreign climes and is sent back when finished, without out ever appearing on paper. However if my connection goes down, then things get interesting. A couple of times I have had to jump in a cab with a freshly-burnt CD (thank god for CD burners!) in order to get a piece of work in – a missed deadline can be critical, especially when stuff may have to be turned around in hours and minutes, rather than in weeks and days.

Technology aside, it is the loneliness of it all that I hate. Imagine sitting at your desk and staring at a screen for weeks on end, without the distractions of a smiling colleague who wants to go out for a drink or (substitute number between 2 and carnage), no people to go to lunch with, fire elastic bands with, no corporate jollies, no meetings, just an occasional phone call to get an extension, ask a question, and often not even meeting the person you are working for, and above all there is no Christmas party to misbehave at, and come to work the following morning to discover photocopied body parts of you and the rather nice secretary.

Working from home, there are of course the distractions of the fridge, the radio, and yes you can listen to whatever you want as loud as you want (unless of course you have flatmates who are also working from home). I found that during a long translation (80 pages of A4 to translate on an environmentally sensitive business park in Eastern Germany – at the end of it, it could have been about a money printing factory in Berlin) my caffeine intake would go through the roof, and I found myself struggling to contain a caffeine addiction – we’re talking pints of coffee here, not cups or mugs, which meant come job interviews I had to go dry for three days in order to avoid coming over as a shaking wreck.

Fortunately I have broken the habit and now only drink tea (it is also a hell of a lot cheaper!), and I have never been a smoker, as from a flatmate working from home who is completing her doctoral thesis, I can tell you that smoking 40 cigarettes a day is not considerate on your fellow inmates, with my former sitting room now a smoky den of PhD vice. Derek, the resident plant, certainly wasn’t up for smoking 40 a day, and so I absconded with him, although it cannot be good for my flatmate.

However I do enjoy being able to set out my own day, not being restricted to a half hour lunchbreak, and I am fortunate that I am able to set my own working times. The danger of course of not having any visible journey to work is the fact that you can rapidly become lazy. I make sure that I always leave the house at least once a day, as unless I do this there is a risk that I might not leave for days or even weeks (you may laugh, but my flatmate only went as far as the end of the street three times in three weeks in January, and only crossed the road six times during this time.

Granted I don’t go out that much, although I do often have to go across town for thinks at least twice a week, and spend the weekends outside playing cricket, but I have made sure that I don’t become completely lazy. Self-discipline is essential, as otherwise before you know it, you are no longer getting up in the morning and the days and weeks can slip by without you noticing, although given the fact that I have a fixed internet connection in the flat, it is very easy to start surfing the web to the detriment of your work, to the extent that you no longer get anything done.

Whilst it sounds great, there is no glamour in it, and the lack of human contact is something that I really dislike about working from home, although the fact is that it saves my bacon and pays my bills, however it is not something I want to do for any longer than I have to.