Joel Stein: Work From Home, Please

Now that both Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo have officially discouraged their employees from working at home, I fear that other struggling companies might do the same and that I might work for one of those struggling companies.

Studies show that working from home is more efficient. A Chinese travel agency randomly assigned a group of employees at a call center in Shanghai to work from home and found they were 13% more efficient, possibly because they could breathe. I’ve been writing from home for eight years, and I quickly learned that I’m far more productive there. No one walks into my office to complain about our boss or, as one former co-worker often did, demand a massage. I have been shocked by how rarely I have to stop working because someone in my house has a birthday. My post-morning-meeting time is not spent talking about where and with whom I’ll have lunch. I really miss working in an office.

Working from home is great for my family, since I get to be with my son, and as soon as he starts to bore me, I get to tell him that I have to go work. I don’t commute, which helps the environment, reduces traffic and, on the basis of how many things I do while I drive, also reduces the number of accidents. I’ve lost weight because I make my own food and work out more, which helps society because my threatening good looks motivate men to treat their wives better. As far as macroeconomics, my studies have shown that working from home is a slight improvement for the overall economy, since while it does harm lunch restaurants, it greatly helps online pornographers.

The only organization that really suffers is Time. Not because I’m less productive but because I’m less unproductive. Workplace inefficiency–meetings, lunches, foosball games, creepy massages–is where ideas come from. You’d be surprised how many serious work topics you can bring up when you’re freaked out about putting your hands under someone’s shirt whose husband you know.

As we know from reality TV, it’s only when you lock people up in a space for a set amount of time that the crazy comes out, and our entire modern economy is now entirely based on insane ideas like photos that disappear in 10 seconds and fixing health care. Other than HP and Yahoo, the companies that are most technologically capable of offering telecommuting and that also could benefit most by reducing expensive Silicon Valley office space all desperately try to keep people in the office as much as possible. That’s why Google provides free cafeterias, laundry, haircuts, massages, swimming pools, cafés and, if I’m reading its patent filings correctly, souls. When Steve Jobs envisioned Pixar’s office, he originally wanted only one inconveniently placed bathroom for the entire building so that people would have to run into one another and accidentally exchange ideas. Plus, people communicate really efficiently when they have to pee.

Because I’m not in the office, I rarely know about editors’ special projects anymore or warn new employees that the more venerable writers on the masthead aren’t mean, just shy and close to death. I almost never help other writers with their work. In fact, since I left, every TIME article is 3% less likely to contain a penis joke.

We telecommuters are not employees. We are the life-hackers of five-hour workdays, 10-minute workouts and two-hour fights with our spouses, with whom we’re home way too much. I used to do things far outside my job description for my office mates because they were my friends. My loyalty, it turns out, was not to an organization but to individuals. Individuals who should know that, giftwise, Hanukkah comes very early this year.

Eight years ago, I used to spend nights in the office, waiting with my co-workers for editors and designers to fix my articles. We writers rarely used that time to work on future stories, because I would organize a group to order an expensive dinner, play Xbox, compete at foosball and clean my office, which once led to my finding a promotional Real World thong that I put on art critic Robert Hughes’ doorknob, not knowing that the U.N. Palestinian delegation would walk by it in the morning.

I’m starting to see why they decided to let me work from home.