Home Is Where the Office IsUnlike Karen...

Home Is Where the Office Is

Unlike Karen Stabiner, whose “self-respect demands that I not work in my pajamas,” I say to hell with self-respect (“The Myth of the Home Office,” Sept. 21).

I wallow in one of the few advantages of working at home. In fact, it never occurred to me, trudging from computer to fridge and back, that writers wore anything but PJs as they earned and ate their daily bread.

Until the day, that is, when, as I was leaving for an appointment, the UPS guy arrived and said with genuine shock, “Why, you’re dressed!”

Carol Easton

Venice

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I’ve been screenwriting in a home office since 1986. I work for myself, and I wouldn’t dream of changing things.

Even on those few occasions when the studio for which I was writing gave me an office there as part of the deal, I inevitably got less done in a given day than when I was at home. Too many people were around. It was a lot more distracting than an occasional ring of the doorbell.

I have human contact--exactly the right kind: I have breakfast and dinner with the wife and kids just about every day, and I almost always lunch with my 3-year-old son. (It was the same with his 6-year-old sister when she was a baby.) I wouldn’t trade that for a 100-foot corner office and a gaggle of hot-and-cold running assistants. I pick my daughter up at school if my wife cannot.

My commute is 25 feet. When people say the air quality is getting a little better in the L.A. Basin, folks with home offices should say “You’re welcome.”

If I want to commune with my peers, I pick up the phone to chat or set a lunch date--or an after-work date. That’s real socializing, not grabbing some stolen moments at the proverbial water cooler.

I dress comfortably. I don’t often sneak out during the day to see a movie, but I could do so if I felt like it. I work for myself.

Technology is the home-worker’s friend. Several writer friends and I e-mail fully formatted drafts of our scripts back and forth for mutual note-giving. The amount of research I do on the Net and a handful of subscription services is mind-boggling.

While I am out, the cell phone and beeper are not tethers to the workplace; they keep me available only to my children and a few others I’ve chosen to be able to reach me.

Ross LaManna

Los Angeles

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I’ve worked out of my home for the last four years and can attest to the fact that home-office workers do not get the respect that cubicle workers get. Only family members know that I really work, and that is because if they approach me during my “crunch time” of 3 to 5 p.m., it had better be an emergency.

I have to do the job of several people at the same time. I am on the telephone with one client, faxing another, printing something out for still another and e-mailing a fourth--all at the same time. To be interrupted knocks everything out of sync.

When my home phone rings between 9 and 5, I know it is a friend who will ask in a very sweet voice, “Are you busy?” And I have to dig deep down inside to say “What’s up?” instead of, “Of course. I am working. What the hell do you really think I do all day?”

My friends all seem to envy me and wish they could work at home, too. I don’t think I could ever work in an office again.

Dottie Brewer

Newport Beach