Welcome to my World

The company I work for is really progressive, in many respects. The CEO actually has his own blog, so unlike other employers who fire their employees for blogging, Sun actually encourages it. We also are developing a very interesting environmental agenda. I think the home working programme should be at the heat of this. I was involved in putting the home working programme in place for Sun in Europe. When I see the car choked roads here, especially at commute times, I'm amazed that other companies put their people through the hassle of having to be at some office or other at 9am. I also went thorough loads of agony throughout my career. Other people made different decisions, but I had to move away from Scotland more than once, because there are very few jobs in my profession back in Scotland. Remote home working seemed to be the key to this dilemma.



Of course, having launched into home working with great enthusiasm in 2002, there are loads of issues with it that you discover after a while. Homes are not really designed to be offices, despite my lovely "spare bedroom turned office" here. I particularly like being able to work next to my french windows. But of course, you can get a lot more noise at home that you can at work. Or, different sorts of noise. The home office in Edinburgh looked out over a nursery school garden. It was generally quiet, but the little dears were released into the outside every so often and they used to go crazy. The teachers used to play music too, so I'm sitting there trying to figure out if an intellectual property clause is properly protective of the supplier, as well as the buyers positions, whilst listening to - "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands", great! Of course, living on your own and working on your own from home, can make you a little isolated at times. This little apartment does become "my world" sometimes. This became particularly difficult when I was working remotely in Edinburgh, and all my co-workers were in the west coast of the USA. Everything was done over e-mail and I couldn't talk to any of my colleagues until 5pm local time.



Also, what's happened now is that we are cutting budgets very tightly to make our numbers for Wall Street. I'm hugely supportive of this as we are finally seeing good profitability on a consistent basis. But tight budgets in the world of real estate make for, almost, compulsory home working. When the nearby campus, Santa Clara, was quieter I used to be there every day. After thinking that home working was great in 2002, I was actually enjoying getting back to a situation where I was able to work with, at least some of my colleagues every day (the others being home workers too, or based in other parts of the world).

The theory for home workers is that there are supposed to be many bookable "flex offices" that you can book any time you need to be in the office. This used to work well, until we shut two large campuses in this area and are squeezing everyone into our existing campuses. So, when you go to book a flex office these days - guess what happens. Nothing doing, all taken. Much worse, there is a practice of "office stealing", so you very often have to ask someone who has taken the office you booked, to leave. This is becoming somewhat stressful. So it's tending to push us home workers to stay at home much more than we'd like. But it's not all bad news at all - I just think of the bonus I got this quarter and all the hassles with home and flex offices melt away.

So welcome to my world. The home office in my apartment. I think I will have to spend even more time here than I used to.



Another part of my world, this is the living room with it's "lived in" look!