Travails of a WFH Life

'Tis a myth indeed, I tell you, the freelancer's fancy life without a spot of bother or boredom. That life of freedom and options and days that dawn with shitloads of possibility. Most of the time it just means the same as your workday: Drudgery, with a whip in hand. Except us freelancers got an extra dollop of cost-cutting in the Convenience and Glam departments.

Okay, you office-goers. I've seen that mock-'huh?' expression of yours; oh I know that smug belief of knowing you've already won the argument elaborated in this Facebook note of most oxymoronic title. I don't grudge you, no. I smile sweetly because I was in your chair once (pun intended). And I know that you're not gonna be in my corner-of-the-bed spot anytime soon. You have no choice but to hear out my little list of pros and cons, because you have to tell me how you win the argument hands down, doncha?

1. So, to begin, there's that little bit about starting your workday. Have you ever walked into your workday morning, only to see a wet towel on your chair or a stinky t-shirt on your desk? Odd. These things happen here. No matter how much you love clutter, am sure you really do need to fold and put away a zillion washed and sundried garments to make enough workspace. No, your workchair doesn't double as overnight mobile almirah. If the airconditioning stops working you just call Maintenance. Or Admin. Or holler for whoever. No need to step out into the blistering heat and shove a pipe through watercooler slats in the middle of the workday.

2. Then there are the doorbells. They're worse than the phone calls at work, because there ain't no missed calls system here. People who need to get work done just call again. Maids however, are not so persistent or interested in doing your dishes or clearing your trash. Ignore them once, and spend precious productive worktime at the sink or shooing cockroaches away from the overflowing dustbin. The next day you'll sprint to the door when she rings, even if that means abandoning The Muse in mid-orgasmic delight.

3. You can't play office politics to get your obnoxious colleague fired. You just gotta live with him. I know, I know. He does nothing except bark, sit around naked all day, lick his balls, and fart away in his sleep from an unshiftable perch in front of the single source of cooling. When he's not doing that, he's shoving his mouth into your lunch or bugging you to take him to the balcony where he does things that fill up your entire office with the foulest smell of that chemical manufactured in laboratories located in doggie bladders. What's dog lingo for 'Stopppitt! Haven't you read the recently amended Employee Etiquette Guide?' File it under 'Most Urgent' please.

4. There's no Kamla ji you can pataao to replenish the hot beverage on your desk all day (adrak chai at 11am, beaten coffee after lunch, elaichi chai at 5 pm, until office timings do us part). There isn't even the coffee dispenser you can walk to (and indulge in daily whiff of narcissism by checking yourself out in a reflective surface on the way), or a water dispenser you can huddle around and whisper lush new office gossip. It's all rather practical and routine. If you want a glass of water, you'd better fill the bottle and put it back in the fridge, or there won't be any more where that came from. If you want chai, you gotta make a trip to the kitchen, put your OCD slab-cleaning self on a tight leash, make some chai, spend some earthshatteringly irritating moments clinking spoon against walls of cup to dissolve the sugar, and walk back to your desk, utterly bereft of any goss rewards.

5. Okay so you're not the goss type. You prefer donning your headphones and making a statement about how you're just barely tolerating the goss-lapping coworkers (who you're checking out on facebook while they goss anyway). The theatrical satifaction of this asocial routine too dies a whimpering death in the freelancer's life. Try the it's-irritating-me-that-you're-interrupting-but-i'll-be-civil look (slow mo removal of headphones teamed up with 'huh?') on the courier guy and suffer the non-reaction.

6. Self image takes a hit because after a point, you forget what it's like to dress for effect. That little perfectly creative mix-n-match wardrobe squeal of the day passes into oblivion, because frankly speaking, there isn't much you can do with mix n match when it comes to floral prints for nighties. You start uploading ancient photos on your Facebook profile, because social networking is fickle and your friends might just delete you if they see the reality of your frumpy-nightie-oily-face daily look. You start wondering why your jeans have suddenly lost their elasticity and why people are staring at your upper lip goggle-eyedly and compulsively when you step out in the day to buy some sabzi. Then you catch your reflection in one of the car windows while crossing the parking lot and realise you've been flashing people with muchhein Natwarlal jaisi.

7. You sort of, er, begin to miss the point of working, really. Earlier, in that mad scramble of a 14-hours-on-a-chair day, you knew you were slaving over that stupid comma in the proof that this text-lingo world doesn't even care for anymore, because there was money to be had at the end of the month. With that money you would eat expensive weekend dinners at your favourite restaurant, buy gorgeous books for your bookshelf that you'd sigh about never having enough time to read, buy lotsa new workwear that you'd hope would lift your Monday blues and inspire you to get cracking on that mile-long To Do list. The viscious circle is complete. You're a materialistic blinkered horse and you love to hate the life. When you're freelancing, you get disgustingly philosophical about things, because that's the only way to lose some of the pain of not having the materialistic life you actually want-but-don't-want. You're still working for the cheque at the end of the month, but you begin to wonder what to do with it. Weekends restaurant dinners aren't cathartic anymore simply because weekends aren't work-proof anymore; there's no one to lock the office entrance shut on Friday nights. There's no point buying books because you'll be writhing under the guilt of not reading them despite being at home and not bound by a routine. There's no workwear to be bought as consolation, because, you'd rather smoke 100-rupee-bill cigars that spend hard-earned money on floral print nighties, right?

8. Okay, so what. There's always that 'choice' that us darned freelancers have, of walking into office and working from the couch at the reception. The boss is impressed with the attendance, and we get to lounge about on the couch while you lot suffer spondylitis with your faulty rickety prehistoric chairs. But even on those days when our gtalk status reads 'WFO', we're not really rubbing our hands in glee with an evil look at you (Lets face it. It gets a tad boring after the first hour). We're still wailing because we're still unproductive and bored as ever. Our To Do lists are still the length of a toilet roll, and as ready for shit as ever. Coming to office just makes you feel like a social outcast loser, because (apart from the fact that you're out of the fashion loop and are dressed like a relic even by your highest fashionista standards), you realise that you came here because you'd started missing conversation. No I don't mean meaningful, warmed-by-shared-woe heart-to-hearts with colleagues. I mean the real stuff. The parallel conversations where you can just speak aloud all kinds of inane things and not feel like 'no one's listening. Oops I forgot, there's no one in the house'. How ardently I desire the opportunity to walk into a room full of people and say things like 'the weirdest thing happened on my drive to work today', and have the power to make their chairs turn. Actually, scratch that. I just wish some weirdest things would happen to me on a daily basis. There's only so much virtual thrill Facebook notifications can provide.

So, after the chair-turning declaration, what to do? Same old shit. Staring at To do list, facebooking, checking gmail every two minutes for mythical mails (deadline reminders/ job vacancies at Naukri.com/ mails titled 'do you have any ideas for this issue?' are not mails. They're just spam until they're resent to me 5 times). Except that there will be a thousand more distractions: the coming and goings of people; the peculiar dress sense of aforementioned coming and going people; the work-shirking longlost accounts people who ask you with an idiotic grin, 'aur, kaise hain?' five times in quick succession and then walk away, unsatisfied with the same answer you've given them five times already; the pre-lunch gossip-gatherers who make you want to vanish into the crevices of the sofa with their longdrawn, witch-like 'how are you?'s. It's when you long to be back in your room, doing justice to the 'lap' bit in laptop as you change 50,000 work positions on the bed/ bean bag, contemplate the Laptop Sutra and wonder if money can be made from this extracurricular joke.

Back to square one. My vicious circle is complete too. And we're still where we were when we started. We've both wasted precious workhours to read/ write utter crap that isn't going to make the slightest dent in our To Do lists. Time to get back to work. You click the little cross on the right corner of this window, while I come back to my desk after a quick daily business meeting and routine quality check with the neighbourhood golguppe wala. I shall await your writhing, snorting, 'you're all wrong!' comments, liberally prefixed with 'you have NO idea...'. As I said before, I'll do anything for a bit of an event in my work-a-day life.