Snow day

November 29th, 2006

One of the drawbacks of working at home as freelancer is that when all the local roads have transmogrified into deadly sheets of ice in your normally temperate, snow-plow-free city, you can’t claim that you’re “snowed in” and skip work like all your staffer friends and colleagues.

Such was the case Tuesday, after a few inches of snow reduced Monday evening’s rush hour commute to a turtle crawl. (Friends reported three- to six-hour drives home, instead of the usual one-hour slog.) So on Tuesday, while many of my friends “worked from home” (i.e., checked their work email periodically while playing poker online and marveling at John McBain’s really fake burn scars on OLTL), I found myself fresh out of excuses. Since I hadn’t lost power or broken my hip on the ice while walking the dog, I would still have to meet my deadlines. Unfortunately, my office was open for business.

Some staffer friends, several of whom work for a big client of mine, had yesterday and today off. Today during lunch I called one such friend and asked if he was leaving work early to beat the fresh batch of snow we’re expecting (and the awful gridlock that would invariably ensue). But he was already home, mainly because he hadn’t gone in to work at all, and was well into his third hour of a 13-hour Lord of the Rings-athon.

Suffice it to say, I was feeling less smug by the minute about the October 17th Wall Street Journal headline I’d saved for posterity, “Commuters Heading to Work Earlier,” an article which I never got to read because I’m too cheap to subscribe to the WSJ. But I did manage to see the opening paragraph from some free business e-newsletter I get. It went like this:

With morning traffic worsening nationwide, more commuters are choosing to head to work in the predawn hours, extending the traditional 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. rush hour. More commuters now leave their homes before or after the peak hours, according to a recent report, while public transportation systems and businesses across the country are changing their hours to accommodate the trend.

Blech (except for the flextime part). Only this week, the score is looking more like this: Employees, 1. Freelancers, 0.

[Correction, made on December 2: My LOTR-viewing friend informs me that he did not take off work this week. He was simply working at home, or WAH as they call it in megacorp-land. As I’ve been trying to tell my family for years, there is a difference. Only I watch GH while working, not LOTR.]

Entry Filed under: This freelance life