People are always asking me the benefits of working at home.

Well, that’s not true. No one talks to me, because I work at home. I don’t really interact with the outside world. For the most part, I work in my living room, which always struck me as an odd name for a room. You’re supposed to live in there? What does that mean? I live in every room. I dine in the dining room, and I keep my bed in the bedroom and my laundry in the laundry room. What do I do in the living room? So I make a living in there.

This is the kind of thing you come up with when you’re a wordsmith, working at home, and you’re trying to push off doing actual work.

But if people would ask me, hypothetically, I would say that there are pros and cons:

PRO: You get to be your own boss! Also, your own janitor, supplies manager, lunch lady, colleague and computer tech support.

(Actually, my computer tech support is my wife, because if I had to fix the computer that was plaguing me all day, I’d probably throw it out the window.)

CON: You might be working, but as far as anyone else cares, you’re also home. For example, every time a call goes out online that someone is looking for a minyan at the cemetery, my wife sends me. Now I don’t mean to call that a downside—it’s a big mitzvah, obviously. But for some reason, I’m hardwired to feel like unexpected visits to the cemetery are a downside.

PRO: No meetings! You can actually go hours without ever needing to speak to another human being, which causes you to start saying things like “another human being.”

You also start losing your social skills. This doesn’t happen right away, especially if you do something to stave it off. I go to teach in a high school every day, though that doesn’t really improve my social skills, unless social skills involve repeating things a million times, not letting people eat when they’re hungry and forcing people to learn new things when they clearly don’t want to.

CON: You need a ton of motivation to get anything done. A lot of people say that not going to work is great because there’s no one around to distract you, but if I had a dollar for every potential distraction in my living room, I wonder how many paper clips I can string end to end before they fall off this magnet?

PRO: At work, you always have people stealing your food from the fridge. On the other hand, that happens at home too. And no one likes it when you write “Totty” on the food to keep that from happening. Especially your wife.

CON: And then there are all the things you have to do to keep the house running. At some point, when you work at home, you discover that it’s way easier to navigate a supermarket before noon on a weekday. Not to mention cleaning the house when the kids aren’t home. Why on earth would you waste that time working?

PRO: One huge thing people say—usually the first thing that comes to mind—is that you can work in your pajamas. This seems to be the one thing these people are jealous of—like their having to get dressed every morning is what’s getting off to every single day on the wrong foot.

But I don’t really see that. Working in pajamas is overrated. Especially the part where you come home from Shacharis and put your pajamas back on.

CON: Another downside to working at home is that, as time goes on, you become less and less technologically advanced, comparatively, to the rest of society. There’s no one to keep up with. The people I do talk to, once I venture out and squint at the sunlight, can’t believe I don’t have a smart phone. I don’t need a smart phone. I work at home. Why do I need a smart phone? So I can take calls while I’m teaching?

PRO: You save time commuting, unless you count visiting the fridge 50 times a day.

CON: How often you find yourself wondering if you’d be more productive if you started sleeping during the day and staying awake at night. Then you find yourself wondering how Shabbos would work.

PRO: Speaking of which, you get to choose your own holidays. If you work for a non-Jewish boss, you don’t necessarily mention every special day on the Jewish calendar, because at some point he thinks you’re making them up, just because you’re the only guy in the office who asked if he can take off for Tu B’Shvat. But when you work at home, you have no problem taking off for holidays. Actually, you have to, because your kids are off for everything. So it’s not like you’re going to get any work done. Also, if there’s no school, they’re going to go to bed later, because, as they’ll point out, it’s not a school night—according to them, anyway. I keep trying to convince my kids that a school night is technically defined as a night before a day of school. (We’re Jewish; days start at night.)

The weird thing is that, looking at this list, it seems like all my pros are cons and all my cons are pros. This should bother me, but it’s time for my nap.

By Mordechai Schmutter

 Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press and Aish.com, among others. He also has five books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].