penfield | Homework?

"Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to."
- John Ed Pearce

At one point in our culture's history, "the check's in the mail" was considered a sincere notion and a plausible pretext for a tardy payment. But even before it had a chance to be rendered obsolete by newfangled technology like electronic bill-pay or direct debit, it was a victim of its own practicality. It was such a useful, valid excuse that people began relying on it, preying on the goodwill of their debtors. Before long, it became not just a cliche but the prototypical bullshit excuse.

In this vein, I surmised not long ago that "I'll give you doubles" -- the oft-spoken but rarely fulfilled promise that would accompany the sharing of one's photographs -- was the rightly successor to "the check's in the mail" as a commonly-offered statement that everyone knows to be baloney. In the twenty years since "doubles" became a standard perk in film development packages, I can count on one hand the number of times someone actually gave me any doubles. I can count on zero hands the number of times I've given anyone my doubles. Total hogwash.

But now that digital print vendors like Snapfish and Ofoto and Picasa have overwhelmed the photography marketplace and given individuals the ability to make their own doubles, you don't hear anyone saying "I'll give you doubles" anymore. So now I have to nominate a new turn of phrase:

"I'm working from home today." Horsefeathers. On a purely semantic level, the act of working is called "going to work." If you're not going to work, you're not working -- you're staying at home. Whatever you do from home may require some physical or mental effort, but it is not work. The proof is that people who do real work, not pencil-pushing white-collar service-industry work, but real work -- like firefighters, farmers, police officers, nurses, fighter pilots -- literally can't work from home, because they have to work. The contrapositive that proves the rule: members of Congress refer to their vacations as "district work periods."

But even all that is irrelevant, because nobody actually works from home. They're too busy being at home. They take long showers, cook elaborate lunches, read magazines in the bathroom, watch TV "in the background," wait for repairmen, watch over repairmen, critique the work of repairmen, mind their children, run errands and occasionally check their e-mail.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that an individual is conscientious and forthright enough to actually attempt to do work from home. As I have learned over the past three days of trying to telecommute from my parents' house in Western New York, it is just about impossible to get anything done if you're not in the office to bother your colleagues about the work they need to do so you can do your own work. And Lord Jesus in Heaven help you if you're telecommuting and you're trying to communicate with another person who's telecommuting; it's like trying to have phone sex via carrier pigeon.

Plus -- and here's the main point -- even if you are conscientious and forthright about working from home, nobody is going to believe you anyway. They're just going to assume that you watched The Price is Right and did your laundry, because that's what your co-workers would be doing if they were at home.

J. disagrees with this blanket assumption. She has a designated telecommuting day as part of her weekly work schedule, and not only does she insist that she is a conscientious and forthright employee but she claims that she gets more done from home because she doesn't have to deal with her punk-ass officemates' whining, nagging and chit-chat. I respect this position. But I kind of wish that she would do the laundry once in a while.