The Many Advantages of Not Working from Home

(For every cloud lining, there's some silver nitrate)

Today, I killed a man. But that's okay.

It was an unfortunate (but necessary) social adjustment, but it's going to be fine, because it took place in the "abandon all hope" left-turn lane of a confused intersection on a criminally-overcrowded six-lane strip of commercial pavement, chock-full of insane commuters, during the daily American gonzo gauntlet known as the "morning rush hour."

So it could be six or eight weeks before anybody slows down long enough to notice the body.

Some of you readers already know about my recent shift back into the work-a-day world, the on-site, five-days-a-week, corporate-American labor pool, and my on-going struggle to adapt. So for you, this is not breaking news. On the other hand, very little that I write, ever, qualifies as actual news. For one thing, I don't have nearly enough money in my Hair Helmet budget to honestly be considered as a viable, professional news biped.

And if you're a paid subscriber to my weekly "opinion" columns, let me first say this: you're lying. I don't have any paid subscribers. If you really are paying somebody for the "privilege" of reading my weekly columns, you're paying somebody else. That's fine with me, and ultimately, if someone has figured out how to con both you and me, I'm happy for the evil little criminal rat scum jerk. I just thought you should know that you're the patsy in a scam of colossal proportions, like ethanol, or automatic payroll deductions.

But one must eat, and one must wear clothes, unless one is a member of Congress. So, in order to remain clothed and fed, one must do what one must do ... one must follow the rules, one must do the right thing, unless one is a member of Congress. That means that we must learn to adjust to new things, to find the good in bad things, to seek the divine in all things, and to keep going to work so we can keep buying more things.

To be sure, working from home parades its allures. Yes, it's fun and safe, it's comfortable, it's familiar and productive, it's convenient and includes easy access to music and beer, and it demands absolutely no expense whatsoever from the employer. But we're already into Paragraph Seven, so let's not drag logic into this.

And it's in that non-bitter, mature adult spirit that I offer you the following list. Like me, you may find yourself faced with the need to actually get in your car and drive to work. But you might not yet have fully pondered some of your blessings. Partly, that's because these blessings are hidden, though mostly, it's because I'm lying. But let's not niggle.

So what are some of these hidden blessings?

Witness:

· When you work from home, you sacrifice many opportunities to hone your guerilla warfare tactics. Among its other benefits, the unexpected inter-departmental interactions that are rife in an office environment can keen your senses and reflexes in a way that no home office can match. For example, when working from home and deep in concentration on some puzzling software problem, I almost never have someone leap out of the tree-line behind me, bound up to my chair and bark, "SCUSE ME. YOU BUSY?"

· Any office environment worth its salt will eventually devolve into a brisk, brutal game of Thermostat Wars. I think there must be a law - every multi-human workspace must contain at least one person, caught up in some kind of post-menopausal flop sweats, who is constantly carping about the heat, and another person who is forever freezing to death. As such, the rest of the room's occupants spend their days watching the Fahrenheit Foes attempt to surreptitiously sneak the common area's thermostat up, or down, a few degrees. To be fair to the caloric combatants, their discomfort is partly due to the dynamics of the room itself, which for some reason was designed to support a full-blown pizza oven on one side of the room and Walt Disney's cryogenic vault on the other.

· Now, let's move on to time-wasting tactics. If you work from home, you're on your own. It's now entirely up to you to figure out how to completely blow a perfectly good hour every morning, and another hour every afternoon. Were you commuting to work every day like everybody else, these two dead-and-gone chunks of your life could have been wasted far more unproductively, sitting through multiple traffic-light cycles in an expensive, pollution-spewing, multi-ton, fiscally-depreciating device, where you would learn from fellow commuters how to employ a modified version of American Sign Language that efficiently culls the communication toolbox down to a single finger. And the spatial measurement skills you'd learn, navigating rush hour lane changes, would go far in preparing you for any post-Armageddon, Mad Max-ish dead-Earth environments, should someone like Qaddafi finally run out of silly hats, get bored, and start randomly punching Korean-labeled buttons on his compound's office console.

· And though we've already discussed the work commute, it's so spectacularly foul tha ... um ... I mean, it's so spectacularly productive that it can stand another, um, uh, treatment. Not only does the drive to work (and from work) present a great prospect for hating (or being hated); the savvy commuter will spot college-course-level opportunities to observe the human beast in its unnatural environment. Next time you're out on the turnpike tundra, keep an eye out for not-so-rare sightings of Freeway Fauna: the musical antics of the Faux Rock-Idol Dashboard Smacker; the drone-like determination of the Myopic Speed Limit Pedant, the frantic feeding habits of the Drive-Thru Dropped-Crumb Pie-Hole Vulture, the Rearview-Preening Mama Grizzly; the Paw-Gesturing Carpool Chatter-Beast; the dreaded iPhone-y Larynx-Warbler.

· For technical and legal reasons, I spend very little time in the Ladies' Room. So I'm not qualified to proffer commentary on that most inner of sancta. But, as a general rule, the male version of the public bathroom has to be seen to be believed, and preferably from an upwind vector. It's a public space that looks a lot like some of the less-well-funded parts of Eastern Europe might have looked, on the afternoon after the Black Plague. Management's decorative motif and maintenance plan seem to have run along the lines of "Bathroom? We own a bathroom?" Somewhere near the sink, there will be damaged dispenser dripping some viscous something in an odd shade of sci-fi green (tellingly labeled Ye Old Soappe) and by the door there will be a trashcan that was last emptied to honor our national heroes at the Alamo. There's usually at least one semi-detached "seating appliance" that seems to have been drop-kicked by some violent commuter who just lost his pet ferret to the Black Plague. In your average public men's room, you'll find anaerobic cultures that have not yet been catalogued by the World Health Organization. Granted, they're microscopic cultures, but they're not nearly microscopic enough.

· And finally, there's the bizarre (but highly anticipated) weekly custom we call "Casual Friday." As far as I can tell, this is some kind of low-maintenance semi-mating ritual in which employees are encouraged to act out their full pantheon of personal American liberties by "dressing down." It seems a participatory, collective effort to dance right up to the edge of codified indecent exposure, without actually crossing over the line into legally actionable lewd public display, or Roman Polanski auditions. Of course, I could be wrong (I gave up semi-mating long ago). Maybe it's just a simple submission to a brutal reality. After all, the ultimate weekly horror is upon the workforce - the Friday afternoon rush hour is looming, and nobody wants to bleed on their good shirt.

So hang in there, America, play the game, and learn to have some fun with it.

After all ... as the Rolling Stones have advised, "You can't always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you just might find you get what you need, minus automatic payroll deductions."