Working From Home

It’s the daily grind.  It’s punching the clock.  Back to the salt mines. Another day, another dollar.  It’s a supervisor you can barely tolerate getting on your case even though you are clearly five times smarter than he’ll ever be.  It’s middle management bungles.  It’s upper management cold-heartedness. It’s a loud factory floor or a tiny slate gray cubicle.  Forty hours per week, plus overtime.

If you are a good boy or girl, that hourly wage will inch up just fast enough to almost keep up with inflation every year and some day you may even join the ranks of salaried management and longer hours dealing with even more annoying people.  It’s described as everything from a hassle to a prison.

It’s a job and you might be tempted to get rid of it. Unfortunately, along with all of the agony, the job also brings with it money.  If you’re lucky, it might bring a lot of money, health benefits and even a shot at retiring without starving to death.

Jobs mean money.  Money, whether it’s the root of all evil or not, makes the world go ‘round and ‘round.  Thus, the inmates refuse to attempt to escape.  In some workplace version of the Stockholm syndrome, the hostage employees begin to trust and rely upon their oppressive boss overlords even though they recognize that the guys upstairs don’t have their best interests in mind.

Even in this modern twenty-first century economy where people change treat jobs like disposable lighters—use it for awhile, then get rid of it—many spend their idle hours dreaming of a comfortable work prison.  Some place they can tolerate long enough to make it to age sixty-five with some benefits.  They don’t even want to grin and bear it for several decades.  They just want to bear it.  That alone would be enough. Even that can be hard.

There are some people who are willing to make a break for it.  They visualize a future that doesn’t consist of years of abuse capped off with little more than a stooped back and a gold-plated retirement watch.  When they daydream, they think about running their own show. They imagine not just making a living, but actually living. They don’t want a new office or to work for the company across town. They want to own their own future and they want to sweeten the deal by working at home.

Others are already at home and are looking for work.  Instead of trying to find a gig on the bus route, they may be ready to do their own thing. Others may just be looking for a way to add a few bucks to the family coffer every week while being able to spend quality time at home parenting.  Instead of forking over their slave wages for daycare, they decide they can be both a parent and a provider at the same time by effectively operating a work at home business.

If you have ever wanted to toss your name tag like a ninja’s shuriken right into the head or chest of a dimwitted middle manager or if you’d like to redefine casual Friday to mean actually putting on pants, this is your resource.

This has been written for anyone who may be ready to escape the daily work ritual. No more morning commutes with other wage-zombies. No more spilt gas station cappuccinos in the car. No more keeping your fingers crossed for a promotion. If that sounds good to you, keep reading.

We are going to examine the attraction and benefits of running your own home business.  We are also going to honestly approach some of the challenges of escaping the traditional work force and how you can deal with them.  We are going to cover some of the many work at home options available and discuss where to find new ones.

In this series of articles on working at home I won’t pull any punches or sell any bogus dreams. You can consider this as a letter of warning or a carefully-crafted escape plan. It may be both.

I’ll talk about avoiding the scores of work at home scams and will spend some time discussing some of the unique challenges faced by those who are working at home and dealing with kids at the same time.

Of course, the whole issue of working from home is incredibly expansive and I don’t profess to cover every single nook and cranny of the matter within these articles. I do, however, think this is a valuable resource that will help you decide whether or not working from home will work for you and, if so, can help you in deciding how to stop being a clock-puncher and to become your own boss.