Thursday, May 5, 2011

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?

8 comments:

  1. I telecommute as often as I can - at least Friday for definite, then as many additional days as I can manage it, usually it's 2 days a week but i've had 3 and 4 day telecommute weeks. My office is my bed, I literally lie in bed with my laptop propped on a pillow and wield my iron fist from there. Unergonomic, yes, but fabulously sloth-like too!

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  2. Toulouse is too cute!
    I love having my two cats with me while I work from home.
    Thanks for the tour; it's lovely to see other people's work spaces!

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  3. Oh... big monitor envy. I have a G4 boat anchor under my desk. :o )

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  4. Toulouse is so handsome! I love tabbies.

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  5. Oh, I miss when my cat used to claw my lap and smack the keyboard when I tried to type...he's getting pretty old and doesn't like jumping up on things. The home office houses my replica Young Frankenstein corpse heads and a nearly life-sized creepy lady painting I got from a friend. Hubby uses a laptop in another room to avoid them.

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  6. Adorable kitty!! Definitely the best thing about working from home is the kitty time, although I rarely get to do it. We aren't very progressive around here!

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  7. I guess I work from home, since I'm a SAHM! Toulouse looks JUST like our tabbies, Lila and Crystal -- I call them my matched set, since they are so nearly identical.

    Like lifeofglamour, I prefer using my laptop in bed, but it does kill my back/shoulders/arms if I'm working too much on the blog or whatever. I try to be aware of it and shift position when it starts to occur. Our desk set is given over to my husband's computer -- we're a complete Mac household too -- and the kids' desktop. Since the hubs often does work from home and the kids need their computer almost every afternoon for homework, I end up working on the kitchen table as often as not.

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  8. Cuuute kitty!

    This was an interesting tour. I think I have those pink dice on my AZ wish list but haven't pulled the trigger yet (did get a neat set by Q Workshop tho).

    Yep, I work from home these days. All I have is a small laptop but I sit in a big comfy turquoise mid-century modern chair and use my 70s orange vinyl footrest, so no back pain or anything. :) Husbeast has about 7 computers and at least 3 monitors even though he mostly doesn't work from home. :P

    PS, I read this http://ow.ly/4UDBz recently and it stuck in my head, so. I'm not a Mac user anymore really (I feel guilty, yes...but I had to use the Other Guys for work for 5 years so...sigh...) but most of my family are Mac people, so I worry that not everyone is aware of new threats. :(

    Anyway...lurve your blog!

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