Working from home is great. I get to work in my PJ’s, drink undefined amounts of tea and unload the washing machine when it beeps. But since this lock down stuff happened I feel like working from home means working twice as hard. I don’t just mean that everything is harder because I am juggling 25 things at once, I mean harder because I now find myself working on my days off. I am always contactable, there is no hiding from a ringing phone and I gravitate toward unread emails.
It’s as if the universe will implode if I don’t keep my inbox at a minimum of four unread emails at any one time. Of course, once they have been read I then just have to very quickly do this one thing, real quick. In the meantime 25 more are shat into my inbox. There is something joyous about going into the office, working, leaving, switching off and coming home and I miss it. There is no off switch when there is constant access to everything office related from the dining room table.
My husband says I just can’t help myself every time I unnecessarily check my emails but really it’s not so different to how he operated during his IT days. My husband used to be ‘on call’ (every bloody evening and weekend, or so it seemed) and he constantly had his laptop glued to his knees. It came along on family days out, meals, trips to family and even joined me and him on an extremely rare spa day, this being one of only two occasions in seven years where we went out without any children. There was the laptop hidden under some towels on the poolside bed.
I should point out that my husband is no longer a nerd, but he still has the magic touch of one. He’s a Gardner, running his own business and now loves his job with not a laptop in sight, until he gets home and has to fix all of the kids technical related problems.
Now he spends his days out in the sunshine, cutting grass, pulling weeds, working on his tan and flexing his muscles for a variety of ladies (I’m pretty sure he does more but this is how I’m choosing to summarise how he spends his days).
I get to be shouted at by angry people, accused of not dealing with an email I received 7 minutes ago and basically blamed by the world for not making something happen even though I’m pretty sure it’s illegal. I have spent my first few weeks of lock down stressed, shouting at everyone in my house and frantically calling my colleagues to reassure me that I am doing the right thing and on the rare occasion that I do sleep I hear that familiar email ping in my dreams.