Working from home makes people crazy...

When I tell people I work from home I tend to get two standard responses. The first is ‘lucky you!’ and the other is ‘you lazy cow!’
For some reason people who don’t work from home imagine that the daily routine for those who do is to have a big lie-in, get up for Jeremy Kyle, sit in their jim-jams to 2pm, tinker on Facebook for a time then go back to bed.
Nothing, NOTHING could be further from the truth.
Working from home demands super tough self-discipline. And working from home with kids requires saint-like patience and juggling abilities that would make a circus clown sob with envy.
In my naivety I honestly thought working from my house with my kids and my dog would be positively idyllic. Granted this was before I even knew my kids and the dog had yet to arrive from his home planet.
Up until a few years ago I had a good office job and often dreamed the work from home dream. In this dream I wandered peacefully around in my perfectly furnished home office, cup of fresh steaming coffee in hand, and gazed out my window to survey my land (3 ft by 4ft with a fetching pea green coloured 2ft by 3ft oil tank). I would send witty emails to my intellectual acquaintances and negotiate top deals with global companies from a comfy sun lounger in the garden. My children would potter around on the grass, intermittently smiling, waving, being consistently and beautifully quiet.
In my dreams my perfect children would know when Mummy had to concentrate and busy themselves with art activities in another room. They would understand that Mummy had to take a phone call and know not to wrestle the receiver from me so that they could scream their demands for bananas at 332 decibels at the person on the other side or call random people on my mobile to inform them how the potty training is going.
At no time during this vision of sheer loveliness did the image of me fishing a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD smeared with margarine out of the disc slot on my laptop enter my mind. At no stage did I envisage having a 3,000-word story erased in a mili-second by a sugar-crazed plastic hammer-wielding toddler. In this vision of heavenly proportions there was no image of me trying to type with one hand while a fussy baby screams into my ear or trying to conduct a Skype call while being attacked by lightsabers.
With working from home the fun never stops. There is no clock off time. There is no end to the working day. There is always something that has to be finished or someone looking for something. While the rest of you office worker scallywags relax in front of the telly in the evenings I am still fielding phone calls from crazy workaholics who ring at 10pm, sometimes even midnight, for a brainstorming session or because they thought of some revolutionary way to make money.
Yes I choose to work from home because it allows me to spend time with my kids, be flexible for them and still pursue my career. But if you are considering it, be warned it is a hard slog, let no one convince you otherwise.
The degradation of ones social skills is probably the worst aspect. One month in, your former colleagues will still recognise you. You’ll still be the peachy colour humans are supposed to be. You’ll still be capable of stringing words together to form sentences.
Six months in your colleagues will be hard pushed to recognise you under the big bushy beard (yes, even the ladies grow beards eventually) and pasty skin. And your mutterings will be barely English… ‘home work at, no go out much, daylight no see, English is speak becoming hardness..’
A year in and the bushy beard is bushier. There’s crazy hair, crazed eyes and you’re three stone heavier. Your conversations contain these words and these words only. ‘Hooba, Hooba, porkrind, choppy hurr hurr, Tayto Crisp Sandwiches, whee!! Ha, ha, happy Jeremy Kyle!’
But this is the life I chose. It may not be a dream come true, indeed it is probably many people’s worst nightmare. But I suppose it’s my nightmare and I love it...sometimes.