Working From Home

Michael In the meantime, I only work three days a week at the office: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I get to work from home; "telecommuting" is the big buzzword, which could best be translated as "commuting by phone." This saves me a 30-kilometer commute from San Francisco to San Mateo and is being used by more and more Americans who work on the phone or computer all day anyway. Since we have a second phone line (which costs only $15 a month) and local calls are free here, I can play around on the company's computer via the internet all day and develop my source code. One day, at midnight, the date on www.aol.com was incorrect, so I logged into the super-secure internal network from home and uploaded a corrected webpage. Considering that this page is viewed by more than 10 million people, I was a bit nervous, but you get used to everything. If there's a meeting at the company that I want (or have) to attend, I dial into a conference call via the other line and can chat with several people at once, who are either also at home or working in the office. If you actually sit in a meeting at the company, it's not unusual for voices of people who are not on-site to come from a speaker in the conference table. At home, it all looks like this: I leisurely get up at nine in the morning and initially sit at the computer unwashed -- much to Angelika's delight -- in my old jogging pants. Once the initial part of my daily work is done and everything is running smoothly, I eventually take a leisurely shower and have breakfast. At lunchtime, I get a burrito from the Mexican place on Tuesdays and a salami sandwich and sushi from the supermarket on Thursdays. I casually stroll up 24th Street in shorts, greeting the shop owners who know us well. In the afternoons, I like to take a bath in between ... my dream would be to participate in a meeting from the bathtub someday, but unfortunately, we don't have a cordless phone yet ...