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Work, sweet work

A free-lancer craves human contact that toiling at home alone can't supply 

I need a job. Everyone needs a job. Humans, like ants and honeybees, are programmed to get up in the morning and go to work. All the other species find themselves something to eat and then goof off for the rest of the day, and we sneer at them as a lazy, feckless lot. We're busy.

We work, and we need to see others like us working all around. It makes us feel warm and cozy to pass another ant carrying its own piece of leaf or crumb or whatever, to wave our antennae in greeting as we go about our jobs, purposeful and useful in the common cause. This is what's missing when we do free-lance work. 

For a while there, instead of a job I had jobs, which isn't the same thing at all. It was satisfying, of course, to know that I could make it as a free-lance writer without actually starving completely to death, and it had its joys, like lolling around barefoot listening to the rush-hour traffic reports, but it lacked faces. Bodies. Other ants. Independence is not a natural state for the worker species.  rent autos cheap car rental orlando economical values

As my markets expanded, it came to pass that I was working for half a dozen people I'd never laid eyes on. My only flesh-and-blood business contact was the village postmistress: I handed her envelopes with papers and disks in them, she handed me envelopes with checks in them. I struggled to convince myself that actual people were attached to the telephone voices of my various employers. I tried to invent faces for them. I almost asked them to send me snapshots. Disembodied, they melted together in the mind and sometimes, for a dreadful minute, I couldn't remember whether I was writing this piece for Tim, Tom or Sara. What if I sent it to the wrong voice? 

It was lonesome. Home is usually either howling lonesome or howling chaos. At one point in my career I had three children under the age of 5, and no one was ever more pathetically grateful for an office to go to — a real office, not a home office, which may be an oxymoron. I wrote in the wee hours of the night and in the morning. After the hysteria of the breakfast table, the sitter arrived and I fled, tripping over strollers and baby bottles and piles of dirty clothes. Frazzled, exhausted, I dragged myself through the streets toward the beacon of my beloved job. Ah, the order and sanity of it: People told me what to do, and I did it; someone else made the decisions; there were grownups to talk to; no one wore diapers, and every bee carried its nectar to the same hive. 

Since the arrival of the modem, many mothers and even some fathers communicate with work from home in order to spend more time with the children, which sounds like a good idea until you try it. Working with small children around is not as satisfying as working with other workers around, because your goals are not the same. The principal goals of small children are to crayon on the walls and break the computer, and things won't improve until someone invents a sensor for the PC that detects the approach of a 2-year-old and instantly saves and shuts down. Computers are designed for corporate offices, not living rooms. Even a well-behaved cat can stand on the enter key until you're working on a document with 30 blank pages in its middle, and what a toddler can do while you're answering the phone will need expensive professional repairs — when your computer man can get to it, maybe next week. 

Chaos or isolation: There is no middle ground. With my house shorn of small children, shorn of all human life except me, in desperation I went forth and nailed the only job within driving distance that didn't mean carrying trays of food. Two days a week now I do some proofreading and write the obituaries for the weekly newspaper. Two days a week I wear shoes and show up at the appointed hour and do what I'm told to do. When I walk into the newsroom, it's full of fellow ants with real faces and bodies. I know their names and what they're doing. My computer connects with their computers, and all of us whack away at our separate tasks toward our common weekly goal. During lulls, we complain about the boss. 

The pay is $6 an hour, and I could make quite a lot more money staying home … but I need a job.

Barbara Holland is a free-lance writer who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her latest books are Bingo Night at the Fire Hall, about her adjustment, as a Philadelphian, to mountain life, and Endangered Pleasures, a collection of essays about politically incorrect delights.

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