The Home Office is my Down-Fall

I was thrilled when my 15-year old son came home about a month ago telling me he had made the freshman baseball team. I knew this was something he really wanted, so I was excited for him when he came home after the week-long tryout with a jersey in hand.

I was less than thrilled when he told me that the entire baseball team was required to stay here for Spring Break. After the 3rd worst winter in Chicago history I was really hoping to go some place warm for a week. Staying in Chicago in late March was NOT AT ALL my plan. To make matters worse the Spring Break baseball schedule was a little “helter-skelter” in that games and practices were at different times almost each and every day, so getting into a routine or a consistent carpool with other parents was easier said than done.

AND to simply complicate things further, a lot of the mom’s decided that they had had enough, and were taking their non-baseball playing kids and heading out of town. All sorts of my friends spent the first day of Spring Break driving their wives and other kids to the airport so that they could board planes to Florida and Arizona and Mexico. Apparently mom’s enthusiasm over the kid making the baseball team had its limits, and sticking around in 40-degree late March weather was the breaking point. “Good luck, play well, and I’ll see you in a week,” was pretty much the mantra of many mom’s during Spring Break in my town.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when the emails from the other dads started flying about driving to and from baseball. We were on our own, and we were going to have to figure this out and make the best of it. However I was a bit surprised when most of the emails seemed to be directed AT ME . . . as in a number of the dads were asking ME to carpool the boys to and from practice. And a few more emails came my way asking me to make sure the boys got lunch, and/or had something to keep them entertained when they weren’t at baseball.

My good pals were basically asking me to be the chauffer and the entertainment director during Spring Break while they went to the office. I was so surprised by this that I actually shot off an email bemoaning the fact that they were taking advantage of me because I don’t have a “big job.” And then one of them emailed back saying it has NOTHING to do with my job, but rather the fact that I work out of the house.

And then it hit me . . . . my home office has become my down-fall.

When I decided to work from home . . . alright I didn’t “decide” anything . . . it wasn’t a choice to work from home . . . it was the only option . . . a lot like staying home for Spring Break this year . . . I figured my new life would be manly. No boss controlling my time. Self-motivation. Utter freedom. I would be a man of intrigue; no one would ever be sure where I was. There would be mid-afternoon workouts and mid-afternoon sex. I would work from mountaintops, South American beaches and sailboats.

Instead, I am in a small room in my house, wearing sweatpants, a hoodie and the underwear I slept in, which is the underwear I wore yesterday, which if I don’t shower soon will be the underwear I wear tomorrow. I have examined the contents of my refrigerator 50 times, I have watched a fair amount of porn, and I spend time each week wondering what recorded shows I can erase in an effort to increase my “Recording Space” to at least 60% on my DVR. Although I have not smoked any marijuana, it’s unclear how my day would be remotely different if I had.

Sure working from home is plenty masculine if you live in a log cabin and are a lumberjack. That’s because you’re not working from home, you’re working from outdoors. But I’m actually working from home. From the place with the washing machine, dishwasher and vacuum cleaner, all of which I sometimes use in between work calls.

Offices are full of metal and partitions and machines that print or scan or vend. My house is full of pillows and beds and glass things that I occasionally break and then have to hide from my wife.

And the problem is simple . . . my surroundings have domesticated me. I thought that being home all day meant my friends would invite me to baseball day games or to play tennis or to drive to Vegas. If they needed my help, I figured they’d think of me as Jason Bourne, available for crime-fighting adventures. Instead they think of me as Alfred. People need to be picked up from airports, and because I work from home, I am in the privileged position of being able to rearrange my schedule to do it. I can wait around for the cable guy and electrician. I can pick up and drop off things before the stores close. I am pretty sure that soon a friend is going to ask me to go to his kid’s parent-teacher conference for him. In fact I just recently took my friend’s son to a doctor’s appointment. When I was there I started wondering what I was going to do if the doctor came in and asked the kid to drop his pants and cough. Do I stick around for that? Do I look away? This isn’t my kid. I don’t even know if this is legal. Can you take someone else’s kid to the doctor’s office??

I feel myself becoming a put-upon 1950s housewife, eager to hear my friends’ lame office stories. No, I don’t miss sitting in meetings where the boss talks about himself while I pretend to be amused. I don’t miss co-workers stopping by my office to tell me their boyfriend problems. I don’t miss people asking me to donate to their kids’ school fund-raisers. But I do miss having women in the office to flirt with. I have no office wife. No crush on the woman on the fourth floor who wears the tight clothes. I am forced to seek out that ego boost by flirting with the women on my street. And flirting with the married women on your own street is probably as sad and pathetic as flirting with a stripper.

It turns out you need annoying co-workers and unreasonable bosses to complain about, because otherwise you turn soft. I’m turning soft. I spend my day staring at my 14” computer screen and walking the dog. No one ever circumnavigated anything from home. No one ever railroad-baroned from home. No one ever defeated the Spanish Armada from home.

Sure Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both created empires from home, but at least they worked out of their garage. That seems way more manly than what I’m doing.

You know it turns out that if you’re allowed to do whatever you want with your time, you will do very lame things . . . well or drive your friend’s kids to a lot of baseball practices.