When is a house not a home (as Burt Bacharach asked in 1964)? When it’s your office. Since last March, and you’ve been working from home (WTF), the chances are that some of your rooms have blurred into one and the same.
A modern day Cluedo couldn’t cope with WFH, unless Dr Black was battered to death by Miss Scarlett in the Billiard Room with a pile of lever-arch files or was killed by Mrs White in the Conservatory using a calculator with a very sharp point. Obviously, if Dr Black was on a Zoom call, unless he’d chosen to use some pretend background, you’d be able to see which room he was in and the perpetrator – and the industrial stapler used as a weapon.
In my day your lap was something you ate your tea off and didn’t have a tiny computer on. These days you could easily mix the two functions up and before you know it, you’ve got egg ‘n’ chips all over your keyboard – while trying to work and watch Pointless.
The kitchen would be the only familiar place which is at home and in the office. However, you’d not have the arguments over who had stolen your Armenian goat yogurt, which you’d marked with your name writ large on a Post-It note. Although, sadly, gone are the opportunities of eating something better for lunch than you’d already brought it.
Lunchtime would be the time you’d normally leave the office, but, you’re WFH so, in effect, you’re in prison. So, sit down with your egg, chips and yogurt and feel at home by watching Porridge; Prisoner: Cell Block H or Sixty Days In (which, if you’ve had to quarantine, is quite apposite – hopefully with less violence or as much making of hallucinatory drugs out of old pay slips).
Mike Richards is WFH 