Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Home-working is the future and lucky those who have a choice in the matter

Working from home could become the new normal
Working from home could become the new normal Working from home could become the new normal

Working from home is coming through these days with mostly good marks.

Others kept on going to work at dirty and/or dangerous jobs because they had no option. Choice, the greatest luxury.

Those of us who left the office decades ago know better than to offer tips for beginners. This home-working is not that home-working.

Pre-virus the best bit was juking out during the working-day, scarpering that you could justify, though not to the neighbours who asked had you no kettle. Walking to clear the head with a coffee at the end of it, meeting a friend to discuss work, share gossip. Lone lunches, a sandwich and a bowl of soup while staring out a café window. Simple, vanished pleasures.

What you cannot have, goes the truthful cliché, becomes what you want most. Contact is what people crave now, bustle and background noise, not solitude. But also not Zoom/Skype contact, with body language distanced and disinfected into unreadability. Multi-national organisations apparently run their multi-Zooms with advance planning, agendas forged in mini-groups/breakout rooms. More efficient, the shape of the less-flying future, and even more soulless than the straggling meetings pre-virus full of windbags repeating themselves.

Home-working once primarily meant freedom from office-discipline, avoiding the (often booze-poached) eye of a fierce news editor. The escape intoxicated those who were bad at getting up early and not great at office-type clothes. Some of the same people (including me) had little of the self-control needed to make working from home pay. Freelancing to London publications as well as Dublin and sometimes farther afield gradually brought new habits, encouraged by new communication methods. (Explaining to a chilly chap in London why Canary Wharf did not necessarily mean the end of the ‘peace process’ was not easy on a payphone in the Mater corridor, a much-loved relative dying in the nearest ward.)

Becoming reliable - though out of the newsroom forever - got a kick in the procrastination when newsrooms and features desks could get you by email, text, voicemail. (Most of them aged 16 now by the sound of them; how did that happen?) And some skills were transferable, and more valuable than others.

Way back in the late 80s, checking in to ‘the desk’ with long screeds from a distance was the privilege of foreign correspondents, war correspondents, the big boys. In the Belfast office of a Dublin paper you were a cut-price version of a war correspondent.

Phoning ‘copy’ from wherever would let you use their phone – ah, that kind woman in the bungalow outside Dungiven - sharpened your writing, especially when it had to be composed as you dictated.

But the most important thing was minding your manners. When journalists finally started making good money copy-takers were still badly-paid. The best were very smart. Sigh when they asked how to spell the simple northern place-names you’d rattled out, fail to say please and thank you to the switch, also on less money, and you risked losing the phone line mid-copy, or a long, long wait for the newsdesk afterwards. A little empathy didn’t hurt. Big stars who remembered nobody’s name wound up shouting into the air on the other side of the world, and everyone in the office heard about their expenses.

In the worst of the Troubles there was comfort in the office. Plus ‘the files’, the library of cuttings, and the black humour that kept so many afloat. Laughter and booze. Talking in the office rather than be overheard in the pub, mistrusting phones. Some were right about that, right to be wary of the drink too.

Good luck, new home-workers. Journalism? Who knows what that is going to mean. If it’s writing you do, find someone to tell you when to stop tinkering and just send the damn thing. Keep a note of lighting and heating bills for the tax return and don’t let anyone price you down. You’re the future now.