Your buyers' names-cribbed from YouTubers or donors-float above their heads in bawdy, colorful letters, and the countdown timer for their orders clips inside their skulls. Crawling back to my bed was a chore, and when I finally woke up and flung my door open, the best part of the next day and most of my customers had gone.Īnd while the art style is cute, the interface is a mess. Just when I'd worked that out I got tired and lost the ability to sprint. The path looked like it should lead somewhere, but it was a long walk to a dead end.
After my first day I strolled towards the sunset, coming to a bridge with a sentry guard at either side. The decision is partly selfish.The west of town is similarly disappointing. For the time being, I’m resisting that option. Now that my older son is entering junior high, he’ll probably want a computer in his room. Day after day, we share our tools in our virtual blacksmith shop. They understand that I can feel frustrated and even defeated by work, but never permanently. To Matthew and Jason, the adult work world is not some mysterious and closed box, but a familiar doorway, an opportunity. I’m often around to help them their projects-their comic-book catalogs, the stories they write and illustrate and print or publish electronically to the world. But for many families, including mine, the home office has offered immeasurable fringe benefits: the comfort of proximity the ability to take them on a walk in the canyon during work hours the Post-it notes from the grade-schooler the self-portraits stuck to my computer screen the overheard conversations between the brothers, the sudden revelations about their lives. It’s a little overwhelming.ĭepending on the situation and the family, working from home can be inconvenient, socially isolating, and sometimes unsafe for kids. Sometimes, all of this happens simultaneously: The X-Files, my boys arguing, the one-dog band, the neighborhood kids running through like herds of pygmy bison. Occasionally, this problem startles him awake and he jumps to his feet ready to flee or fight. Our old dog, who wants to be with the boys all the time, is another issue. One time I found a neighborhood kid hiding under my desk. Scissors and tape disappear mysteriously. One day, when I was out of the office, my older son decided to program one of my computers to play, upon startup, the spooky theme song to “The X-Files.” When a disk was ejected, the computer blurted out anxious dialogue from the show: “If it’s not human, what is it?” During shutdown, a voice from the computer would announce, ominously, “You may not be who you are!” One of my boys and his buddy had borrowed it for a Nintendo mouse that had lost its ball. After a couple of hours of chanting Computer Voodoo, I accidentally turned my mouse over to discover that the ball inside as missing. My two sons are good about respecting the sanctity of my computer, but one day I couldn’t figure out why the cursor on my screen was stuck. The wood rats in the garage/office attic offer gratuitous editing. One day, a swarm of bees flew up from the canyon and applied for internships. My home office is in a converted garage on a canyon edge behind the house. I often travel for work, but working from home helps compensate for work-travel absences. And of course this was true for mothers and their children, too. The sinew of this earlier tradition was time and proximity. On the farm, in the store downstairs, in the blacksmith shop next door, a child might work with his father, might hand him the tools of his trade or might play to one side while his father worked.
In those days, fathers spent a lot of time close to their children. Working from home was the norm for many parents before the Industrial Revolution swept men up and sent them off to the widget factories, and later to office parks and office building, where women eventually and rightly joined them. Often on weekends, or after school, my sons head for the small Macintosh that sits a few feet away from my bigger Mac. Which tradition?Īs a writer, I spend much of my time in a home office staring at a computer screen.
We should be cautious when we talk about traditional fatherhood. In 1995, I wrote a column about working from home, which was later included in The Web of Life, and adapted here:
At the time, I missed my colleagues in the newsroom. When my boys were small, I considered myself lucky to work at home.
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