WORKING IT OUT : Telecommuting Centers May Not Have Oprah or MTV, but There’s No Boss Around Either
Though telecommuting--working at home over the phone, more or less--may well be the wave of the future, the guys you usually hear about are Mendocino-based accountants or millionaire software geeks who retreat into the Rockies with computers, fax machines and telephone bills as large as all outdoors. But recently, there’s been a lot of interest in telecommuting centers, buildings where a lot of people get together to telecommute at once. The centers are just like offices except closer to your house, and your boss is probably 40 miles away. (How does your boss know you’re working instead of playing Mortal Kombat? She really doesn’t.)
In theory, the telecommuting-center thing is pretty cool: If it catches on, there might be somewhat less traffic and smog, and more hours devoted to lawn care.
Some post-earthquake commutes to the Westside, for example, involved three freeways, two mountain ranges and a twisting, 10-mile canyon road, and sometimes by the time you got to work you were too worn out--or possibly stoked from coyote sightings--to do anything more strenuous than go out for cappuccino or make little zoo animals out of paper clips and white-out.
After the quake, a telecommuting center in the freeway-impaired Antelope Valley filled up almost at once; there are big plans for centers in Riverside and Orange County and Santa Clarita.
While it is true that the person who would rather work at home than go to a telecommuting center is able to eat garlic toast for lunch and wear an Ice Cube T-shirt the whole day through, it is also true that this person may tend to be over-familiar with daytime TV, not just Oprah and Ricki and Jerry Springer, but cooking shows, “Yo! MTV Raps,” and documentaries about the stately elk. (When you have a project due, a tuna casserole episode of “Laurie Cooks Light and Easy” can seem mysteriously compelling.) He or she may even get around to bathing the pugs or oiling the wainscoting--sometimes it’s time to shave and get out of the house.
It can be fun to come into some kind of office, within reason, especially if you are one of the great army of contract workers and temps, apt to be booted from any desk at any time, dressed down for making unauthorized phone calls to Walnut, carded for the company ID you do not have. There may be distractions, but usually not the fatal sort. There is probably a place to tack up a photograph of your cat and another to rest your Heal the Bay mug.
You can, presumably, make office friends, who are better than the other kind because they never ask to borrow money. And you can drink as much bad coffee as you care to pour. You just don’t have to drive as far.
Telecommuting centers are applauded by highway planners and probably by Al “Information Superhighway” Gore. The phone companies really like them. Who do you think makes money on faxes and voice mail anyway? Plus, if you feel like a schmo slaving over a hot keyboard on a day you could be down at the track or planting sugar snap peas in the garden, experts say, telecommuting centers might help you work more efficiently.
But for all of the apparent virtues of the centers, for all the saved fuel and afternoons rescued for weekday barbecues, I can’t help thinking that telecommuting represents yet another outflow of jobs from urban-core Los Angeles to the far suburbs, yet another opportunity for Southern Californians to isolate themselves from one another, to avoid meeting people not exactly like us, to reduce what scrap of community we all still share.
