The Heaven and Hell of Working at Home

You only have to go to Starbucks to understand the duality of working at home. It is packed during the day with people who work at home. They are there for hours staring at their computers and they certainly were once in cubes or offices or sitting at conference tables. Globalization and a 1099 workforce has put a lot of people back into their kitchens. We were a nation of people who charged out of the home and hit the office. Now with computers we are becoming a nation of people who roll out of bed make our coffee and hit the kitchen table or the home office or some chair, couch, that works as a place to handle emails, write reports, compose novels.

The heaven of working at home is no commute, no interference, you just get down to work. The hell is there is no commute, no interference you just get down to work. Where is that coffee clutch moment where you gab with Bob Jim Nancy Ann about your weekend about how hard it is to get going on Monday morning. Where is that meeting where you are putting your head together with other people. Where is that lunch that coffee break, that feeling of camaraderie and finally that moment of leaving and driving back home in compartmentalized bliss. It is not there for many people anymore. There is Starbucks.

You have traded all that for your cat your dog those calls that never seem to come. There is no ringing phone, no buzz of people, not even the soft whisper of the keyboard. No. You are a company of one. No wonder people run screaming out their door for a coffeehouse, the grocery store, anything to get a little interaction. Add winter to the mix and you have people who will do anything to return to the workforce. It is not for the fainthearted.

Just ask anyone who has retired.

williamhazelgrove

The New Starbucks Era of the Office

When I go to Starbucks to work it is jammed. And not with the artists of old but the business people of new. People are obviously are working more and more from home and they don't want to work at home. I get that. Home is where the stress is. Home is where the quiet is. Home is where people aren't. The biggest thing people face working at home is there is no work buzz. There is no camaraderie. Starbucks solves these problems.

There is music. There are people. There is a buzz. And American business should think about this because offices have become morgues. The Internet killed the noise of the office. There used to be the ringing phones and people conversing, , meeting, talking. Not anymore. There is on the soft click of keyboards. People send emails to other people one cube over. This silence is not good for people who have to work.

I worked in an office once with a manager who could not stand noise. The office was a morgue. People hated coming in. People need noise. They need to feel like they are part of the whole or they feel like it is them against the world. Starbucks provides the buzz of old. People talk laugh cry yell work spill things. There is the sound of commerce. Corporate America should wake up and take a page out of Starbucks atmospherics.

Maybe they could even serve coffee. What a concept.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Existential Dread of Retirement

Retirement is a brutal business. I know a man who retired recently who had been in business for fifty years. Now he doesn't know what to do with himself. He enjoyed the driving off to work and being involved with people and the camaraderie any work environment brings. He always put work first. It was the most important thing to him and he would always tell me about the projects he was involved in.  He was happy in his work.

But now he is retired and the existential creep is settling in. Most people defer this until the day they can no longer. Staying busy and workaholism is very American. A busy person is a successful person. All those writers staying at home pity them. What they must do all day? And how can they stand not going off to work? But then...then work betrays even the most diligent and vanishes over the next hill like a bad uncle.

And you are left standing there alone. And all those years of never considering your place in the universe come crashing in. It is not just not having anything to do it is the existential dread of the moment put off for years and years. Death seems to be lurking in the closet or the bathroom or the garage. All one can do is take a deep breath and accept the moment.

It has really been there all along. You just didn't know it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Unemployed in Summer or the Pro Leisure Tour

There is being unemployed and being unemployed in summer. I have been unemployed in winter, fall, spring, summer. But there is nothing as sweet as hearing those words in June, your fired, terminated, letgo, we are going to have to make a change, we have decided your services are no longer required, we making a reduction in staff, you have been  laid, off, canned, shitcanned, made redundant, parked, YOU ARE FIRED! I remember when I was writing my first novel I wanted to be fired and in June my boss called and said, well, you may or may not like to hear this, but...YOU"RE FIRED!

Alright! Pro Leisure Tour Baby! That's what we called it. A badge of honor to go sailing, drinking, hang out all summer long and take in the sunshine and the festivals and go swimming, sleep in, go to Wisconsin, pretend like college never ended. Here was the test. You are in your backyard in your recliner with shades on and suddenly it hits you: what is everyone else doing? They are WORKING! You are pulling unemployment and skating along while the rest of the world is stuck indoors. You are unemployed in summer and September is a long long way away.

I had just come back from biking the other day when my neighbor walked up. I usually didn't see Frank around too much, because he was always working. But I noticed he was around a lot more lately and so he walked up and we made neighbor talk and then he dropped the bomb. I got laid off. I nodded. Congratulations. Frank looked at me. I mean now you have the whole summer to yourself. Frank kind of smiled and said all the things men say when they get canned. Well enjoy your tour I said as he walked back to cut his lawn. Frank was bummed, but he had been canned at the perfect time.

So being unemployed in summer is a great thing. You can almost imagine it's like school and you are on summer break. That's the way we all grew up. I remember once when I had a corporate job I came out of an office and stared at the high summer heat in the trees and realized it was summer. What the hell was I doing in a suit in a dark office? They fired me the next month.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in summer

Cabin Fever

I get it why Hemingway lived in Key West and then Cuba. I mean I really get it watching the snow swirling outside my window in the middle of April. Cabin Fever. This is when it is the worse. You have done your time. You have suffered through the sub zero days and the snow and you have trudged through gale force bone cracking wind and now it is April and you should be rewarded for living in the Midwest and going through weeks without sunshine and days so dark and cold you feel like slitting your wrist. But NOOOOO. It's snowing and its raining and the sun wont be back for a week. Cabin fever hits you like a dark night.

The real thing that gets you is going to Florida. You come back and your first question off the plane is: How stupid am I? And you answer it quickly. REALLY STUPID. Why would you live in a place where basically people spend seven to eight months indoors and then run outside like hysterical lepers at the first sign of sun only to get rained on or snowed on or blown away in a tornado. In Florida you get up and go for a run and sit on the beach and yeah it's full of retired people and everyone is transplants and the alligators and swamps are a little weird, but WHO CARES! It's beautiful man and you are not stuck in doors.

And yeah when you get older you come to realize that the Midwest is where all the coalminers live. People work in the Midwest. And then they work some more. And then they work some more. Then they get old and die. GREAT. It's not as bad as all that but it's close. Just ride the Metra in the dead of winter with all the commuters and it looks like something out Russia with everyone trudging toward the Gulag. And then you to this place where it is sunny every day. Nobody seems to work. Cars don't rust. You wear shorts and eat seafood. And the ocean is there just for you.

But that is not where you live. You live in the Chicago land area. Everyone does work including you. And you cannot figure out how to escape. So you wait. You wait with everyone else. You wait for the sun and grit it out until...June, maybe July...August?

www.billhazelgrove.com

Rocket Man will blast off in July

Spring Break for An Exhausted People

You fall out on the beach after a brutal winter that feels like something out of a Russian novel. You are amazed that somewhere there are people who sit on beaches and soak up this incredible sunshine and you immediately wonder what they know that you don't. Because it is not only the winte,r but an exhaustion from stress and work and stress and work. Chicago seems like something out of a Siberian winter and the people you remember from the trains and coffee houses going through their days seem more like coal miners than a thriving middle class. And then you realize you are a coal miner.

Why else would you spend your time in an area of the country that is frozen for eight months? Why would you live near industrial centers spewing toxins and God knows what else? Why else would you live in an area that is just for people to work and work and work. Because down here in the boot of the country in Naples Florida this is where people come to get some relief and it makes you wonder as you stare at the Gulf and hear the surf like someone who has just come back from a war because you have come back from a war for survival--if there is a different way to live.

And you hear all sorts of other languages: French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and you  have to wonder if the whole world has been sold a bill of goods. That you are supposed to spend the majority of your life working in areas you take vacations from to see how life should be and then  go back. And of course the world doesn't wait or care. Your small hell will be waiting for you when your week ends. So you just stare at the water and feel the sun and hear the surf and then you just sit down in the sand and face that glorious sun and drink up your missing Vitamin D, muttering...I made it. 

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man is scheduled to blast off April 26th