Well, as the title suggests, working at home this way has it’s pro’s and it’s con’s…

The Pro’s

Mrs-MaFt works shifts so child-care is relatively easy. If she’s working then I do the school/nursery runs and catch up on my work later in the evening once it’s passed bed o’clock for the kids.

If I’m not too well I can still get work done without worrying about infecting my fellow co-workers with the lergy. With an office job I would lose a whole day even if I would have been well enough to get some work done.

I could come to work hungover and no one would know.

I could come to work naked and no one would know.

I could come to work naked and hungover and no one would know.

If I lie in (unlikely, I have kids!) it takes me 12 seconds to commute down the stairs and open my laptop.

I can nip out to the local Farm Shop, Morrisons or Town during the day and miss the busy times.

I can listen to punk rock and metal all day long instead of the awful pop ‘music’ pumped out by Radio 1 and Galaxy (the requisite ‘entertainment’ in all the non-home jobs I’ve had)

Courier deliveries result in actually having your item when they deliver it rather than having until the weekend and then driving a 15 mile round trip to pick it up from the depot.

The Cons

It can be all too easy to waste too many hours dicking about on eBay or doing too much research on a gadget I simply can’t afford to buy.

People assume that, because you’re at home, you’re not busy and can jump to their every whim.

No ‘snow days’.

It can get quite lonely at times. A lazy, fluffy black cat and a handful of cyber-colleagues on instant messenger software just doesn’t match real, actual physical company.

On a morning if I have Mini-Mrs-MaFt then, generally, she will be watching CBeebies. That itself isn’t a bad thing – it keeps her entertained and she practises her dancing when there’s some music on. However, as pointed out by ‘Mrs TheBoyAndMe‘, it usually results in having “please tell me, please tell me, pleeeease teeeeell meeee your name” stuck in your head for too many hours.

It’s too easy to get lazy. Sometimes after Mrs-MaFt has taken Mini-Mrs-MaFt I can’t be bothered switching from CBeebies to Kerrang! Radio on the tellybox.

In Conclusion

Working at home has it’s pro’s and it has it’s cons. However, I wouldn’t change it for anything! Following various people on twitter and general day to day dealings with other real people it would seem I am in a minority – you see, I actually enjoy my job and the work I do. I work with some great people spread out about the world in various different time-zones yet still get time with my family. A lot of jobs can’t offer that flexibility – if I had to commute more than a staircase away then that would, straight away, remove 2 hours of available time from the day. And I’d like to keep those those 2 hours, thanks!

Postscript:

Well, in case you were wondering what brought this post about, it was the result of a brief conversation on twitter with @TheBoyAndMe. Click the image to the left to see the whole thing. It’s a quite tenuous link once you actually read it, but that’s what made me think of writing the post! Having CBeebies songs in your head is definitely a ‘con’ of working at home!

Luke Macgregor/REUTERS (via Guardian)

These kids are only out for one thing – to cause havoc. Why else would they need to cover their faces and hide their identity?

I’m all for students having a moan about tuition fees although I completely disagree with their thinking that uni should be free. They have a right to protest, but not to cause criminal damage and to assault people. They have a right to an education too. The thing is, they’ve HAD that education. You see, education is only compulsory up to the age of 16 and it is paid for by the government. Not everyone in the world has that privilege even though education it is one of our human rights. On the subject of human rights, today is actually Human Rights Day; Another human right is the protection of your own property – something the students seem to forget about when they start breaking stuff!

Further to the free education that the government pays for from the age of 3 to 16, they also give you an extra couple of years in 6th form or college. Again, this is generally free and certainly beyond the call of duty. Going to University is not a right, it is a privilege and one that I was lucky enough to have had, although it was expensive!

When I started uni in 1998 they had pretty much scrapped the grant system; I got about £500 in my first term and that was it. The rest of it was paid for with a £9000 student loan (that I’m still paying back), some money from my parents towards accommodation and a part time job helping run a punk-rock mail order catalogue and working at record fairs around the north east. The working part was the best part – it felt good to be able to pay for some of my education myself. It’s surprising how much difference £50 a week can make.

What annoys me most about the current violent protests is not just the fact the students are clearly looking for trouble, but that they think they have a right to a university education. Sorry, but if you want something extra then you have to pay for it!

When I planned on going to uni I had a career in mind – I would study biochemistry with biomedicine and then go work in research labs either for a pharma company or at a university research lab. I pretty much fulfilled this although my current line of work is as detached from biochemistry as Jordan is from Peter.

I think one of the bigger issues about the whole fees debate is the reason WHY these students want to go to uni. Is it to further their education in order to get better jobs? If so then really, these days, a degree isn’t going to make much difference except in certain fields like medicine or engineering etc. I frequently hear of people who went to work straight after 6th form that have better jobs/careers than those who went to uni. When I went to uni it simply wasn’t possible to get the jobs I was looking for without a degree – hence I got a degree. Some of the courses on offer these days are ridiculous and have no practical value. Perhaps if the students were to do proper courses then 1) there’d be less people in uni ‘just for fun’ thus allowing more funding per student and 2) they might actually be able to get a relevant job at the end of the course! Are they going to uni to learn or to avoid having to get a job in the real world for a few more years? Whatever their motives, it’s clear that they’re not bothered about their education – how else would they find time to travel to London to protest? My degree involved, from memory, 12-15 hours of lectures and 6-8 hours of practical sessions every week; At the end of my first year, when everyone else had 6 weeks of dossing about before Summer, we started our 2nd year modules so that we could fit everything in; I also had to do 2 dissertations.

So, there you go. Stop your whining and, if you want to study, then go and do it instead of messing about starting fights demanding you get everything for free.

P: forgot to tell you i found an MS update the other day that adds DVD and ISO burning to WinXP. Installed it to old PC but not tried it yet..

M: cool

P: also Nero 9OEM for £3

M: i have win7 now. it’s the future
M: cos it’s a bigger number

P: sorry nero isn’t the update…
P: i’ve got 7 too but other PC is XP

M: though really win98 should be the best

P: i liked windows word 5

M: how come, right, my windows is windows xp but word tells me it’s 2003?

P: what version of word?

M: it’s windows xp
M: so it shoudl be word xp but it says word 2003
M: so does that mean i’m actually on windows 2003?

P: probably.
P: word XP was 2002

M: damn – my printer’s nt compatible with windows 2003

P: can’t you incrrease the gigabytes?

M: it needs windows USB – apparently won’t work without that version
M: i have 1gigibytes of memory – is that enough? will i run out of space?

P: how many photos do you have in words?

M: think most of them go in there – words is the one where it shows a small version of the pictures, isn’t it?
M: can i delete the small pictures from there as it’s only the full size versions i’m bothered about

P: why does my broadband not make my PC faster?

M: ah, i know this one
M: it depends how many other people are using facebook at the same time. you see it’s only “up to” 8megagigabytes
M: which means you won’t get that full amount – AND even if you DID get the full 8 your hard drive is 250gigabytes so the 8 won’t actually increase your current computer

P: ah so if i’m downloading a game how many emails can i recieve

M: i don’t think you can get emails while a game is downloading?

P: my friend said you can because of the width of the bands and stuff

M: it would probably give you a virus as the email would mix in with the game anyway.
M: i woldn’t risk it.
M: unless it was a really fast game
M: then you could download the game before you even had chance to log in to aol webmail

The sad thing is, a lot of the statements here are things we hear real people actually saying…

But anyway, short blog as I’m tired…! Have a good weekend!

So Monday and Tuesday of this week have been spent juggling work, phoning the police, phoning insurance companies, phoning and emailing O2 and getting used to my T-Mobile G2 Touch as a temporary measure. Today is Mrs-MaFt’s birthday and if she doesn;t like the Happy Meal toy I’ve bought her then I reckon things can only get worse…!

On top of the extra stuff to process for PocketGPSWorld I also seem to have had a tonne of stuff to do for my own websites (new links to add, videos to upload, domain names to park and nameservers to edit) – this in itself is a good thing, it’s just a bad time so soon after my pseudo-holiday…

I actually toyed with the idea of actually starting some work but after about 2 seconds I thought ‘sod it’ and went back to bed for a couple of hours!

MaFt

* my phone which now looks rather swish thanks to the awesome free UI, called ‘.Home’ from PointUI.

Needless to say I’ve had three of these calls this morning trying to pressurise me into giving them £500 over the phone to get an A6 advert into their wonderful magazine that no one has heard of but it will guarantee over 11 contacts each week…

Reckon I’ll give them a miss and just deal with customers directly for now!!

MaFt