Tag Archives: Commute

Since I started school, I’ve been working from home a lot – usually three days a week.

My new parent company has really encouraged working from home, so it’s a relatively serendipitous turn of events, especially after getting home at 11 PM on class nights. Not having to leave again at 6:45 the next morning means I avoid the stress of ensuring breakfast and lunch are ready to go, figuring out my clothes, repacking my bag, etc. Plus, I can sleep in a bit. And, in theory, I can work out with that extra 3 hours of my day I’m saving.

When I first started this routine, I was worried I’d become too much of a hermit. Or worse, I would epitomize the worst of The Oatmeal’s Working At Home warning.

In reality, though, I’m busy enough that it’s not really a concern. Instead, I’m coming to love my work at home days as a way to help balance work with the rest of my life. You know, like doing laundry. Plus, my house is QUIET. Often, in the afternoons as I hit my stride and am cranking through my to-do list, the only sounds in my cozy home office are my fingers flying over the (ergonomically incorrect) keyboard and the snoring of the cat. Compare this to the often-raucous cubeville with bad lighting and plentiful distractions.

And I don’t need a key to use the bathroom.

I can sneak in a run at lunch or mid-afternoon when I need a break. In a few weeks, I’ll pull out the patio furniture and eat lunch outside, in the sunshine – far better than the terrible fluorescent lights and climate control of the office. I take conference calls while balancing on a wobble board.

In reality, I think I’m working more the days I’m at home. There aren’t the distractions of the office – no passing-by-the-desk hello and chat, no experiments to see if we can build a plumb bob to represent the building’s sway in the wind – and there’s no rush to bolt out the door right at five to catch the last express train bound for the hinterlands, so I can reach a more natural stopping point.

And the meals? For an evolving cook, working at home is divine. It’s nice having the time to sautee spinach, dice some peppers, and crumble feta into my morning eggs. I can easily throw together a marinade at 3 PM so dinner is ready to cook at 5:30, and I’ve ended the frantic just-got-home-starving-starving-FOOD-NOW panic.

The other day, I saw a Ted Talk from Jason Fried that nailed my Work at Home rationale:

He’s absolutely right about the office being like a Cuisinart, shredding your day into “work moments” where you can’t really accomplish thing. After all, you can’t get things done in the annoying 15 minute breaks between meetings. Fried says that work is like sleep: useless in short, choppy blocks.

But you know what’s even better than working at home?

Having the day off. I’m heading out to play.

I was at the suburban job for about two months before returning to my old company downtown in a new role. The experience taught me a lot about what makes a good job and a good company. Meanwhile, I expanded my commuter shoes theory.

My current (new-old) job is at an urban office full of a very diverse workforce who live all over Chicagoland and commute via public transit. At lunch, there are dozens of nearby places – all within walking distance – and the area is very amenable to head-clearing lunchtime strolls.

Other Company was in a suburban office park. There was an attached parking garage, and (nearly?) everyone drives. (One of the IT interns often had a bike helmet on his desk, but that could have been a red herring.) Schaumburg has a seemingly great network of bike routes, but they don’t connect with Elgin’s nor those of the towns in between, and sometimes end mid-block, answering the question of where the sidewalk ends. My window cube overlooked the forest preserve, and I could watch hawks soaring around, looking for lunch.

However, working at Other Company added a new dynamic to my Commuter Shoes theory. For the uninitiated, my theory of commuter shoes holds that the easier the commute, the more likely you are to wear practical shoes.

When I lived in the city, I took the El to work, which was usually standing room only. Not only were the cars overflowing, but you were pressed up against strangers, and the lightweight cars would sway and jerk violently from side to side, throwing you into your fellow commuters. Yet, despite the difficulty in staying upright and holding your balance (which, with time, became a skill), the majority of the women commuted in impossible shoes – stilettos, tall boots, heels of all flavors, etc. Even in the summer, with a nod to “comfort,” you would see a flotilla of flip-flops, which offer no support for walking any real distance. Yet, women who commute via the El likely walk the most and spend the greater part of their commute standing on their feet than those who commute with other modes.

While making the suburbs to city trek, I commute on Metra. I bought my house in part because it was an easy walk to the Metra station, so I knew I wouldn’t need to drive at all. In fact, nearly half of my 7-minute walk was through the Metra parking lot itself. Probably 95% of my fellow Metra commuters drive to the train. In the morning, everyone gets a seat – though in the evenings, as gas prices have risen, it has become more difficult and strategic to guarantee a seat – and then we walk to our downtown offices. In my case, it’s about 7 minutes on the Chicago end, too. Even so, despite the much more comfortable, seated commute and the reduced walking, most Metra women wear what I termed “commuter shoes” – comfortable sneakers or, increasingly, the new athleisure shoes to carry them through the commute before changing into “work shoes” at the office. (I periodically purge the accumulated shoe collection from under my desk – at one point this spring, I had eleven pairs lined up.)

In an office where everyone drives to and from work and to and from lunch (as there’s very little in walking distance – and I got crazy looks when I walked the 15 minutes to the nearby strip mall for coffee), many women wear comfortable shoes all day. Many never have to step foot outside at all during their commute, yet Nikes seem to be the footwear of choice.

While at Other Company, I usually wore my work shoes (sandals with heels) to and from work. I did discover one important caveat – the grocery stop. Where I don’t pass anything on my Metra commute, while working in the suburban office park, I passed nine, count ‘em, nine grocery stores on my normal route home – more if I deviated from the path. It was great to run in and grab a couple things or heck, even do my full shopping trip for the week – the stores are much less crowded on a Tuesday evening than on a Saturday afternoon. But high heels are not designed for grocery store power-shopping and can be dangerous in the slippery produce aisles. So I threw a pair of old flip-flops in the car to slip on when I need to snag strawberries.

When I made the decision to return to the city – albeit with more opportunities to work at home, or WAH – I happily dusted off my commuter shoes. It’s great to be back, though I’m not looking foward to the icy days ahead.