stomp stomp
“I do everything round here”
stomp stomp
“can you just go and get me this”
stomp stomp
“I’m not a slave”

Hmmm… is it 2003?

Just explain, ”I’ll come to work with you one day…”

See how she takes that.

Politely telling your partner to piss off is one of life’s simple pleasures…

What is this weeerk, worrrk, work, you speak of? sounds bloody tedious.

Buy her a new dolly tub, that’ll keep her in the scullery

Tbh its worse when Im at work and she’s at home, concocting lists of items from shops that are geometrically selected to ensure the most convoluted and irksome journey home

Elsewhere, on mumsnet:

‘My so won’t talk to me when he works at home, even though every time I go in the study he is on some sad cycling forum or else w**nking. I don’t actually mind the w**nking, but the bike thing is getting weird’

“My so won’t talk to me when he works at home”
Almost right, but on mumsnet it’s DH not SO

Hence why I stay late at work…

All ok here. I’ve had the odd Skype meeting interrupted by the boys but they get that headphones on means don’t start yabbering at me.

Mrs G-d is very good.

BUT the ******* cats. No bloody respect for my keyboard. Ironically the furry ****** leave the mouse alone completely. I am still waiting for the day when I come back from making a cup of tea and find my user account locked out due to one of the scratchy clawed irritants walking 3 times over the enter key.

My missus works a lot from home these days- she hates it when I come home from early shift and disturb her peace.
Benefits my cycling no end. 🙂

Call me an old fashioned traditionalists, but isn’t “work” the place you do work ?

Why should it be?

Technically my desk is in a building 2 hours away. Why should I have to move house? Or take a job I don’t want in Cardiff?

Why should.my company restrict itself to hiring people who live nearby?

Why should we all spend an hour or two a day travelling to an office to sit and work at a desk when I’ve got a desk at home and I can talk to everyone I need to on the computer or phone? Especially when most of them are in other locations anyway..

Sorry mate but yes you’re old fashioned 😉

Indeed. My team has someone in Plymouth, one in Manchester, one in Hertfordshire, couple in Norwich and me in SE London. Sometimes we also work with colleagues in the US and Australia. Where is “work”? Notionally there’s an office where some people in the company go (at least some of the time) but we certainly don’t.

Old fashioned? Has there ever been a time when some folk didn’t work from home?

Good point. Offices and factories are a relatively recent invention in human history.

Current employer encourages flexibility and works on an occupancy ratio of around 60% for our real estate (large worldwide engineering and environmental design firm). That means that when we refit offices we have around 300 desks in an office with a 500 staff headcount for example. Lots of flexible space though, people all work agile, most work at home or elsewhere regularly. It works well for most, self included.

Has there ever been a time when some folk didn’t work from home?

The kind of work you might do at home has changed a lot though and it used to be more manual work (my aunty used to do piece work sewing shoes) that people used to do at home as employment  – if they weren’t self employed. Anything administrative or managerial really needed you to be in face to face contact with your co-workers. The kind of work people did at home was more obviously work to people they shared a house with. Sitting quietly in front of a screen doesn’t give off the same ‘I’m working’ aura.

During the last few months me and my brother have taken turns caring for my mum at her home – setting up a little hot desk in the corner of the room so we can get on with our work, keep our respective businesses running and keep her company. The strange thing is though – for her with dementia – is there is work we can do around the house (laundry, tidying. cooking etc) that she can relax and let us get on with. But sit down infront of a screen , even though you can engage in conversation and we’d set up the room so we could see each other –  and to her mind you’re pointedly ignoring her and she found it really aggravating- as if she’s being deliberately excluded. It actually reached a point where she was getting violent if we sat at the desk. Although thats an extreme example I can see how people’s partners can get frustrated by someone working from home – it creates a weird kind of loneliness for them.

Interesting tangent this has taken. I work for a civil service agency that traditionally had a wide spread of geographical offices as we physically need to look at things to do our job properly. Office rationalisation then meant fewer offices but our experienced staff could work from home if their office closed.

Now we aren’t allowing any more staff to work from home, as we continue to shrink the office network. So experienced staff are having to be made redundant. And we get managers panicking because we have HUGE gaps in our geographic coverage, staff travelling 250 miles a day, even now having to stay overnight sometimes.

“We want staff to work more flexibly blah blah”. Yes, we’d like to work more flexibly as well to allow us to do the job properly, but hey,…..

Women are mental, simple as that.

I can walk in the front door and be greeted with something along the lines of ‘i’m so lucky to have you’ and then 24 hours later, doing absolutely nothing different i can walk in and she is ready to teara strip off me becasue she’s had a bad day which is nothign to do with me i hasten to add!!

I’ll never, ever understand them andhave give up trying. In fact if i ever did split up i dont think i really could be arsed starting over again!!

When i worked from home (i dont anymore, instead i go into the city centre to one of those places that charge you by the minute) i had the same sort of thing….i could be in the middle of a call and she’d be stood there to tel me that the dishwasher was making a funny noise or some crap!! 🙂

Why should it be?

The whole thread albeit tongue in cheek suggests why it shouldn’t 😉

I’m dreading this weeks half term, if it’s not my wife sitting down for a chat it’s my son asking me about how things work, or my daughter asking to give her a lift.  To the point I have diarised a few days in one of our offices an hour and a half each way.  I am creating an office space in the spare room!

I can be out in the garden with table saw, drill, grinder, cutting tiles, painting doors etc. because she’s made it perfectly clear that the speed with which I’m completing the house renovations is unsatisfactory

I found the difference between the unsatisfactoryness associated with the speed I could achieve whilst being interrupted by constant requests to mind the kids and pop to the shops and whatnot, to the unsatisfactoryness associated with doing absolutely no renovations whatsoever, to be so small as to be undetectable. However, the second one was a lot easier.