Truth About Work at Home

So you want to work at home? Are you absolutely sure? Do you have the resources, the endurance, the drive? In one respect, those of us who work at home are the persecuted victims of a harsh reality. But in another respect, the work at home life is the only one we will tolerate.

First, those of us who work at home are not freaks who are incapable of holding down a “real” job in the outside world (as one snotty executive once wrote on a writers’ bulletin board). The work we do in our homes is real; in fact, it is more real in that it requires trusting we can make an income that is not guaranteed in a paycheck on the first and fifteenth of every month.

Next, we who work at home must contend with elements that are outside of the boundaries of the public workplace: the roommate who lives in the bedroom above our workspace jousts furniture, plays tribal music at great, shaking volumes, and slams doors as if angry ALL the time, at EVERYTHING. The 20-something kid next door rarely works, so at home too much he shaves in the bathroom sink, clogging it weekly; he plays God awful disco-throwback music during your work hours, and turns it down only after you cry (turning it back up again so the bass beats a cacophonous to the diastolic and systolic of your industrious and focused heart, or deciding to take a shower in the bath next door, playing the music softly but singing passive-aggressively loudly—and excruciatingly off key--as he bathes); and he slams doors, too, as he is related to the roommate upstairs.

In addition, though you are in a terribly remote area—which you first thought ideal for quiet, creative work at home ambience—the housing development requires dump trucks, cement mixers, and pneumatic drills that only stop during the horrific winter rains…which cause, because you are in a remote area with above-ground wiring that busts, explodes, catches fire, and takes out your power three to five times a week.

Finally, you are on your own to do the actual work, which means you are the service provider, the advertising team, and the accounts payable and receivable desks. And as many nightmares past will account, getting money for work well done is not as dreamy, not as easy as you imagine it will be when you design your business plan.

But in defense of the freelancing lifestyle, despite the fact that there are no built-in laws allowing you to shut up people, blow up machinery, or show up deadbeat clients with a quick lawsuit or bounty hunter enforcement of the laws of the work at home, there are irreplaceable benefits: you have the ability to follow your own rhythms. You can be nocturnal or diurnal or both. You can turn off the phone, mute the answering machine, set your own hours, work as hard or as little as you decide. You can watch (or listen to) TV or listen to music of your own choosing. You can pick and choose what projects you take on and can—if you don’t mind wiping your butt with newspaper, brushing your teeth with baking soda, or filling your gut with leftover gifts of fruitcake and candy canes—pick and choose the people with whom you do business.

You can work at home that is, if you have the innate calling to write or sell or whatever, if you have the steely skin it takes to forge on against the incessantly occurring odds, and if you have a very large, very effective “Do not ^$%$%)##@@=+ Disturb” sign that you use and enforce.