One of the joys of self-employment is the freedom to decide where your home office will be located…
When I first started work, it was in an open-plan office – the Eastern Province Herald newsroom to be precise.
I don’t think I had any idea what an office was supposed to be like. I knew that important people like the Editor (then Koos Viviers) had offices but I did not know what might be in such an office, since I was thankfully never called into it.
(The only time I saw the Editor was when he sallied forth at the end of the day, making his way magisterially through our tatty desks on his way to the pub. In six months in that newsroom he said one thing to me: “Answer that phone”. The phone in question was ringing on someone else’s desk and it was in this way I learned a sacred truth: in a newsroom, you always answer the phone.)
Thus it was to be for almost all my working life. I moved from open-plan office to open-plan office, learning as I went to work no matter what the noise or distraction. I did get to go into the Editor’s office as time went on, for meetings in which the staff gathered as a group.
And then, very briefly, I was an Editor myself.
An office I hated
Well – actually an Acting Editor, holding the fort between the departure of one Independent Online Editor and the appointment of another.
I moved from a cramped and convivial and frantic online newsroom to a small office in the corner (no windows though) with my own desk and a door that could be closed.
And I hated it.
I was lonely and miserable, and wanted nothing more than to get back to the tiny desk I had previously been irritated by.
Another editor was duly appointed, and I went back to sharing with other people – something I kept doing until I left office life at the end of 2016.
Working from home
My home office when I started out was a cordoned off area of a larger space: all the rooms in the house were otherwise occupied. It had a gorgeous large custom-made desk which I had commissioned when I knew that I wouldn’t be doing the corporate shuffle anymore.
And there I worked right through until August 9, 2024.
South Africans will know that August 9 is Women’s Day. People who know me will know that I am determined not to celebrate it.
And so, every year, I do decluttering over the Women’s Day weekend – it keeps me away from the pink-festooned news cycle completely.
This year though, I moved my office instead of declutteting. My son moved out into a studio flat on our property and that meant a bedroom upstairs was no longer in use.
The family asked several months ago if I wanted to turn the now empty bedroom into an office, but I resisted. I remembered that miserable stint in an office at IOL years ago, and I worried that I would miss the comings and goings of the household.
I also didn’t want to leave my lovely desk, which the technically minded members of the family declared would not be able to be moved up the stairs no matter what they did.
Over time, I started to wonder what it would be like to have a room all to myself. So I tested it out. I took my computer upstairs and, on a makeshift trestle table, tried a couple of days of working in the former bedroom.
I found that I liked it – and so I, over that irritating weekend, I moved all my office equipment upstairs, using two smaller tables that could be got up the stairs. That meant that all my quilting equipment and my fabric stash, which had been stowed in the bedroom, could go into the space formerly occupied by my office. My lovely table is now a full-blown sewing table.
I now have a “proper” office
I’ve been here a month and am making the move permanent.
I love having all my sewing and crafting supplies in one place, and a desk on which I can sit down and work on my sewing machine without having to take it out and pack it away again.
I am still secure in the knowledge that I could work in the middle of a taxi rank if I had to (those years of open plan offices are not going anywhere).
But when I open the door to a room that is mine and mine alone every morning, I smile. And I close the door at the end of the day, declaring the working day over.
I think I hated that corner office at IOL all those years ago because I had been placed there by factors beyond my control. The joy of running my own business is that I can choose how and where I work. For now, that’s this lovely office.
READ MORE
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Main picture: The new office, complete with electric blanket on my chair – a goddess-send on cold mornings.
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