Newsletter 142: Celebrating 15 Years of Not Working in an Office

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is from January 2019, about working out of home. Next month, it will have been 15 years since I worked in an office environment. I’ll confess, I do not miss it.

Do you realize the last time I worked in an office was 2005? My last job where I had to commute to an office every day was Registered Rep. magazine, in a tiny little cubicle enclave on 14th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. I hopped on the C train at 72nd Street, giving me enough time to skim the entire New York Daily News by the time I arrived downtown. I had to be in by 10 a.m., but I always got there by 9 so I’d have time to answer emails — I didn’t have a computer or Web access in my apartment, a time that is increasingly feeling like the Golden Age — and edit all The Black Table stories for the next day. I was terrible at the job. I had no interest in financial reporting and in fact couldn’t balance a checkbook myself. But it was an office and it had internet and it was a job and it paid my bills while I figured out what the hell I was going to do with my life. As you can see, the stakes of my life in 2005 were not terribly high.