Home is where the heart is. Usually.

Last month, my family and I finally took the great leap into the 21st century and signed up for an unlimited home broadband contract. While the main difference has been an increased willingness to always use the HD option on iPlayer, it’s also meant that working from home is now near-identical to working from the office. I must admit that when I first thought of the idea of working from home I did scoff a tad: how exactly would I replicate my work PC there, let alone get access to the Spark servers and the massive amounts of information I need to send and receive every day. However, with a laptop, a mobile ‘phone contract with sufficient minutes, a Skype account for when I need to ring abroad and a broadband contract that means I’m not paranoid about going over my allowance every time I open a load of images from the server, it couldn’t be simpler. I’m not about to start living in hotels or anything, but for the moment it does provide a good occasional respite from the office.

After all, that’s what working from home tends to be for me: an occasional change from the office. It’s not like there are less distractions: indeed, with postmen, milkmen, other deliveries, children, confused neighbours, next door’s kids’ football and chimney sweeps it can be a wonder anything happens at all. However, it does provide a valuable element of flexibility. Whilst we’ve all heard of the freedom that the cloud and broadband can offer workers, in my experience this freedom tends to be something you need thanks to utilities companies, deliveries, school trips and shenanigans on the Underground.

At the same time, this freedom isn’t going to benefit everyone. Yes, those of us in PR, journalism or other related fields can benefit from the ability to fix our working lives around our private schedule, within reason. We can order online for when it suits us, make sure we’re at home to meet the gas man and structure our days so that, when needed, we’re always free to pick the kids up from school. Yet there are many, many more who won’t see quite the same advantages: your average bus driver, factory worker or shopkeeper might well be able to order their shopping online but making sure they’re home to receive it will be a very different matter. Like many developments in technology, the benefits of mobile working aren’t really being shared equally at the moment. Admittedly, given the needs of various jobs such equality could be hard to attain. Yet those of us who want to shout the life-changing virtues of much technology, and I count myself among them, still need to bear in mind how lucky we are to benefit from those changes in the first place. After all, in terms of its grand impact on society in a lot of opinions the internet is still some way behind the washing machine.