Dial-up and deadlines - My at-home work life 20 years on

I was probably smeared with Weet-Bix and snot

I can’t recall that first day working from home. Paid work that is.

I was probably smeared with Weet-Bix and snot. And spiked with wee spasms of guilt after dropping my one-year-old son into somebody else’s care. But only wee spasms and they didn’t last long. Actually, it was nice having a quiet house to myself.

The only noise was of my own making. Phone calls in and out, landline of course. And that nearly forgotten sound of a dial-up modem. So distinctive, short-lived and frustrating when – after all the dit dits, whoohoos, whooshes and ee-aws – it failed to connect.

It was January 2002, and I was a part-time journalist employed by a nursing magazine and a midwifery journal. Which was lucky, as my paid child-care hours were always less than my work commitments, and nurses and midwives were very empathetic when an interview I had slotted for “naptime” was interrupted by a screaming toddler.

I had been a distance worker before maternity leave so was used to not living in the same town as my co-workers and boss.

But being a distance worker who worked from home, was still far from the norm. So the DHB and Ministry of Health bureaucrats whose practice was to play voicemail tag, by returning journalist messages in out-of-office hours, were surprised to get a person answering and not an answerphone. That’s another throwback to earlier times – the days when journalists could directly ring ministry mandarins, rather than having to send emailed questions.

My home office equipment was basic but stylish. I loved my tubbily-round iMac – colour “Snow” – affectionately known as Blanche.

It was later replaced by a skinny widescreen iMac without a nickname. But I swore at it a lot after I stopped it toppling over on 22 February 2011 and found myself holding it aloft for far too long, as my desk bounced and the floor rocked.

In the days before files were automatically saved to the cloud, my iMacs were strictly off-bounds to my son’s sticky fingers, at least until he could read and even then, only outside of working hours, which as a working mum were rarely conventional. The poor child, at an age when he could barely see over my desktop, learnt that “deadlines” did not bring out the best in his mother.

My mind boggles at the thought of parents having to juggle working from home while teaching stir-crazy kids during pandemic lockdowns and isolation periods.

But luckily most children are resilient. And my son has turned out to be a surprisingly nice young man, despite being scowled and snapped at on many a deadline. He did delight in giving me the pictured “deadline” mug a few years ago, making his contrite mother cringe and smile.

Come March 2020, a good chunk of the world joined me and my fellow home-based workers in discovering the benefits of commuting down the hallway and being able to wear fluffy slippers at your desk.

Also, the downside of no gossiping in the tea-room or being able to leave your work behind at the office.

Then there was the pandemic bonus of me no longer being the sole distance worker filling the office’s meeting room video screen, in all my middle-aged splendour.

Instead, I share the screen with my workmates in that “Brady Bunch grid” now so synonymous with 2020 and 2021.

Which is great for those days my home office hair is a little astray or, now totally self-inflicted, I have a Weet-Bix smear on my chin.