Good-bye House! Hello World!

Dear Internet,

Over the past five and a half months I've had the luck of rolling out of bed, traveling down the hall half awake, filling my Seagull coffee mug, AKA Remnants of Long Island, with fresh brewed Colombian coffee, wandering outside for a cigarette, and then navigating myself back down the hall to work a full day (well, close enough) from my home office. Next Tuesday dawns a new day for Shelly: I will be venturing off to an office for real, live, honest to goodness work.

Holy Shit!!!! Only now am I realizing the true ramifications of this endeavor. Now I will need to rise, presumably, when the sun is doing the same thing. The cats are already prepared to pounce on me at 5:30 AM, and will certainly be excited in the coming weeks and months because they will be dining on Friskies at 6:30 AM instead of 7:30. This is going to be huge for them. And by huge I mean they're kitty screams will be of joy instead of panic that I'm dead and they won't get Mixed Grill or Salmon Dinner.

I'll need to wear socially acceptable clothes and shoes. Probably even business casual. I'll need to ride the bus, and perhaps a subway. Buy lunch. Talk to people. Do work. What on Earth was I thinking?

Now that I really think about it, working from home is a fantastic concept. Even the words have a nice ring: work from home. Home. It's sort of like saying, "Look like an asshole, drink at your desk, do whatever, as long as you just get the job done." I prefer "work from home" tremendously to Working Remotely. That is a buzzword if I ever heard one. And kudos to the maniac who came up with the whole idea. S/he should really be awarded with some sort of prize for being awesomely lazy and manipulative.

Working from home, aside from allowing me to maintain a paycheck after moving and adjusting to Chicago, has also offered me some fun stuff. First off, I can, if I feel like it, just roll out of bed. I can work in front of a TV to stay on top of the comings and goings of the variety of hosts on The View or check out Giada De Laurentiis' latest creation on Food Network. I can wear retarded outfits. Actually, I'll be honest, they're not outfits. It's just crap slapped together. Crap from seventh grade. And, I can start drinking really early in the day if I feel like it. Working from home, it's a wonderful thing.

But like anything awesome -- like cats, babies, narcotics -- there are some downsides. So when considering working from home as an everyday gig, please consider the following:

1. You will get bored. Often. There's no one to talk to or not do work with. I've taken to talking to myself more than I did originally. I bitch and moan about how everyone is a jerk and needs to get a life, learn how to function, etc. I also live in an alternative universe where I'm really important and relevant.

2. Your cats will sit in front of your monitors at the worst possible moment and make it nearly impossible to check your Jack White RSS feed or watch the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County on Bravo.com.

(I realize that Jack White, The White Stripes, The Dead Weather, so forth and so on into eternity, and The Real Housewives of Orange County do not really mesh, probably shouldn't be uttered in the same sentence, and that I have committed a mortal sin. I also don't care.)

3. It takes nearly all of your energy not to crack open a beer or have a Bloody Mary before 2:00 PM.

4. There's really no excuse for not making your bed or washing the dishes. You have no where to go.

5. Everyone thinks you're still working, even on vacation days, simply because you work from home.

Having said all that, it is important to clarify that there are, obvs, some major up sides to working from home:

1. If there's no one to talk to you can just chat on IM all day. You also can wear whatever the hell you want -- including t-shirts with holes in them, flip flops, no make up, and sweatpants. (I really wish I had bought a pair of Pajama Jeans before the end of this whole work from home thing.)

2. You can do your favorite things: hang out with your cats and obsess over when The White Stripes are going to put out a new album, when The Dead Weather are going to come to Chicago, if you should become a Platinum Member of The Vault and get special records even if you don't have a record player, and watch and learn endless things (I call it research) online. In the past few months I have really learned a lot about Heidi Montag, Kim Kardashian,and some other nonsense. Today for example, I read John Mayer's interview in Playboy.

3. You can crack open beers at 4:00 PM because it's 5:00 PM in New York. Which usually results in something like this around 7:00 PM.


4. You don't have to make your bed, because you can work in it. I can't do anything about washing the dishes. You should really do that anyway.

5. You technically work later because you're in a different time zone, so you can send nasty-grams at 6:00 PM Central and the jerks on the East Coast have to start working again. Suckers.

In the end, basically what I'm saying is that working from home kicks ass. But it's also boring. Working in an office is awful, but gives you great material. At least if you have worked in the Dunder Mifflin of software. Or anywhere remotely dysfunctional. I'm sad to see my days spent in front of a computer in an apartment on the South Side of Chicago go. I'm sad about losing free flights back to New York. A company paying for my Internet. Friends and family back home. But I'm also excited to get outside, pick up a hot dog at lunch, meet some new people, and generally feel like I'm part of the world again. At least right now. I'll let you know how re-joining the real world is next week.

Shelly