Before we had children, I didn’t count on quite how noisy they would be—or how fascinated they would be with the mundane stuff going on in my office. And yet every day there they are, knocking on my window and peering inside, as if looking at an animal in a zoo.
If I have forgotten to lock the door, I may turn around in my chair to find them trying to dismantle my printer or stick their fingers in electrical sockets. Once, a telephone interview I was doing with the former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was interrupted by my older son, then three years old, and completely naked apart from a pirate eyepatch, bandanna and plastic cutlass. “Ahaaar!” he shouted, waving the cutlass in my face.
“What was dat?” said Schwarzenegger.
I stammered something about the joys of children and silently managed to shoo the boy out of the room without putting down the phone or my notepad. The governor, had he seen this manoeuvring, would have been proud.
Noise at home is also a factor. We stupidly bought my six-year-old a basketball hoop but the only flat part of the garden where it can stand is directly outside the office. The metronomic sound of a ball bouncing on concrete has become a maddening backing track and opening my door on hot days will invariably be followed by said ball hurtling into the room and smashing into my computer.
I shouldn’t gripe. I no longer have to endure having someone’s armpit being pressed into my face on a crowded train and home status means I should be a more productive worker, if a recent Stanford University study of a Chinese company is to be believed—although the authors acknowledged that working from home could also lead to “shirking from home”. I would argue that a bigger problem is losing one’s marbles : staring at the same walls every day and not going anywhere can do strange things to a person.
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