This week Fandango asks us for our thoughts on working from home.

Have you ever worked from home as an alternative to going into a worksite to do your job? Would you prefer working from home or working from an office? If you have been able to work from home since the pandemic hit and are now being told that you have to return to showing up at the office everyday, how would you feel about that?

A lot of my working life was spent as a cleaner either for the city transit system in Adelaide or as a housekeeper working in hotels and serviced apartments. Unfortunately, cleaning is not a job you can phone in.

Hypothetically though, if I’d had the sort of job that I could do from home I would have loved it. Before the pandemic there used to be a lot of talk about “work/life balance” and I think that working from home would have suited a lot of people especially those whose work was less time sensitive. By that I mean that it would be nice to be able to fit work around the needs of the family rather than vice versa even if it sometimes meant working at night or the weekend.

Commuting is one thing that I would not have missed. There are more productive ways to spend a couple of hours of the workday than sitting in traffic or on a train or bus. I know some people can work on trains but by and large it’s wasted time.

I also wouldn’t have missed having to deal with bosses and co-workers’ bad moods and interruptions.

Of course, you get interruptions at home too. We all laughed at those videos of people trying to work and being interrupted by small children or pets during lockdown. However, I got the impression that that sort of interruption lightened the mood rather than being upsetting.

I can see that there would be a case for getting workers together from time to time to discuss things as a team and I wouldn’t mind that. I might even enjoy the occasional day in the city and seeing everyone if I mostly liked my workplace.

However, if your place of work reminds you of Dilbert can anyone really blame you for wanting to work from home.