CorpGoth Working From Home

I mention it often enough, so why not give a little tour of my home office? My company is generous with telecommuting benefits, for a couple of reasons. For one, many of our jobs can be done anywhere -- we're an Internet company, so if you have a computer & the net, you can work. For another, the company is committed to being eco-friendly & fewer cars on the road in this congested area is always a good thing. So many of us have at least one work-from-home day per week. Recently, I've had two due to a variety of circumstances (and hey, I've been at the company 10 years, might as well get some added value ;-).

The first thing we did when we bought our house was turn the detached garage-with-bonus-room into a complete studio for my husband's music production & video editing work. He does that on one side, & I have the smaller (but still reasonably large) area for my office, which can double as a guest room as needed.

We are a 100% Macintosh household. I recently replaced the monitor, & I got a new Mac laptop from work, which I plug into the monitor (my personal computer is a Mac Mini; under the desk is my retired G5 tower). Working directly on a laptop is horribly un-ergonomic & will ruin your back, shoulders, & wrists -- folks, I highly recommend hooking it up to a proper keyboard & monitor if you work on a computer for more than, oh, an hour a day!

Hydration is important. I keep a big glass of water at my desk; one cup of coffee in the a.m. And the Buddha watches over, along with a chunk of ameythst, old gaming dice, and a kui nut lei from Hawaii.

The shelf above the monitor has reference books like the Yahoo! Styleguide, the AP Styleguide, & the Chicago Manual of Style, plus inspirational books such as Ulysses by James Joyce, The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts, & an anthology on feminism. There's a photo of me from nearly 20 years ago with a wax Shakespeare at Madame Tussaud's in London. The plastic Godzilla has been on different permutations of my desk since high school. Cthulu rides a ceramic Vespa, because the Elder Gods would have wanted it that way. There's a calligraphied poem by William Blake above it all.

Of course, one of the best things about working from home is the company. Sure, my husband is around, but my boy-cat Toulouse sits in my lap, drooling on my keyboard, trying to keep me from typing anything legible. He loves hanging out in the studio while we work.


Do you telecommute? If so, what's your home office setup like?