Telecommuting

Okay, time to explain all of those references to some things becoming easier soon. I will soon be working from home.

This has good sides and bad sides. I have enjoyed spending time with my coworkers, and the conversations we have had. So many weird pictures would never have been drawn without our weird exchanges.

That being said, not all of the exchanges happened in person. The junkie whales came from a Communicator conversation, where someone’s tale of watching Celebrity Rehab meshed with someone else’s tale of watching a documentary on whales, and I started thinking about what a large quantity of methadone it would take to help a whale make it through.

Avoiding being sedentary will be harder. I mean, I will still basically be sitting in a chair for forty hours a week—there’s no getting around that—but heading to the bus stop, from the train to the building, and back to the train (I usually get picked up at the train instead of busing at night) adds a lot of steps. On a day when I do all three of my walking activities (walk to work from Goose Hollow, walk at lunch, and do the stairs in the afternoon) I am over 10000 steps before I leave the building and I still have the walk to the train and probably exercise.

On the other hand, on weekends where I don’t make a specific effort to take a walk, I may end up right around 3000 steps. Our standard workout right now only adds about 1300 steps. It has other benefits, and step count is not the only measure of fitness, but the point is that it would be very easy to not exert myself much.

What makes up for it is that taking away that commute time should increase the available time for taking walks and doing other things. I generally leave the house around 6:10 to start work at 7:45. That’s if I get a walk in first, so it is not straight commuting, but if I grab the bus there instead, or ride to a closer stop and walk from there, it only saves about ten minutes. Leaving the office at 5:45 or 6 generally gets me home around 7:10. That’s a significant time loss.

It’s not that the time is wasted now. That is my reading time and my thinking time, and sometimes my resting my eyes time, depending on how tired I am. I can think during lots of different activities, but reading doesn’t combine with most things as well as it does with commuting.

Obviously I will not need to get up as early or walk the dogs as early, but maybe I still should. The nice thing about doing that now is that no one else is around and in my way. Also, the dogs are used to it. (This makes them very annoying on my days off.) Obviously, there will need to be some balance.

Speaking of the dogs, when I went to a four-day schedule, I chose Thursday as my day off because my mother alternates being gone on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she hates leaving the dogs alone. Thursday tends to be the longer absence, and Tuesdays were our meeting day anyway, so that was the obvious fit. Now it will not matter when or where she has to go, the dogs will have supervision. I am still planning on sticking to four days. It won’t be necessary from a dog standpoint, but it’s still convenient for appointments, and for having another day to write.

There are some things, though, that will definitely be easier. First of all, yes, there will be less socializing at work, but socializing with other people will be easier, because I will not need to get back from downtown, and yet it will still not be that difficult to get downtown if that’s where the social life is. For my coworkers, I think we might see better participation in happy hours once the transition is over. Actually, that’s another reason to go. If I stayed, there would not be many people left here with me.

Also, it should be easier to eat healthy. It’s more than not having to pack a lunch (though that will be great—I don’t know why such a simple activity requires so much effort), but it will be easier to start incorporating whole grains. If I leave instructions for Mom, she does pretty well at putting together dinner, but I don’t even know what instructions to leave sometimes. If I can spontaneously decide to just cook some barley and add diced orange bell peppers, well, I can try it. Right now I would never leave those instructions because if I have no idea how it’s going to work I’m not going to drag other people into it, and I have no idea because I have never cooked with barley. There’s a bag in the pantry, but I have been procrastinating opening it. No more!

Also, weather is less of an issue. I normally enjoy the walk and the fresh air, but we had a rainy spell shortly after I started where it was clear that Portland had some real drainage issues, and I would get home just sopping wet, where I needed to strip the minute I got in the door just to not get water all over the house, and hope that my shoes would dry in time to wear them the next day. I’m not going to miss that.

If some of you are wondering about the toy drive—it is not just you. Some coworkers have asked too. We won’t be able to do everything quite the same, but I think we can have a December get-together where everyone brings toys, and has face contact, and I am planning on keeping the claw machine animals above my computer desk to preserve some continuity. I’ve stopped bringing in the new ones actually, so I already have five collecting at home. (They consist of a pink giraffe, blue elephant, Pittsburgh Pirates Bulldog, Mets teddy bear, and an awesome Holstein cow with a flower in her mouth.)

I will miss my morning train driver, and sometimes the entertainment value of Tri-met is hard to deny, but sometimes it smells awful, and sometimes the entertaining crosses over into depressing. It’s not like I’ll never ride again. I suppose, though, that this is a good time for a review of some of the strangeness I have witnessed.