Michael Goldfarb delivers his home truths on the incongruity of working from home and receiving important phone calls whilst naked or otherwise indisposed...
The phone rings. You answer it. Simple, no? But now that I’m working from home I find it not so simple. Context is everything. The phone rings at home. My wife answers.
"Sweetheart - it’s that nice Chris from the Â鶹Éç." Now it’s hard to comport yourself in a businesslike manner when you are summoned to the phone by "Sweetheart." All the years I worked at Bush House my producers never summoned me to the phone that way. And when I answered the phone I had an answering technique that changed thoughout the work day - a cool and slighly anglicized in the morning "Hello", and a postively brutal close to the deadline "What?". It was a way of saying in a single word to friends, bill collectors and editors that I was not to be trifled with at that moment. But you can’t bark "What?" at home. Your wife is getting calls, your mother might be calling for an idle chat.
The phone rings. "Honey". You pop out of the shower to be handed the phone. Now it’s not that I’m not used to working naked. I spent most of this decade working as a foreign correspondent. I’ve filed plenty of voiced dispatches down hotel telephone lines in a state of complete undress. My colleagues do it as well. During the Kosovo crisis, every time I heard John Simpson on the phone line from Belgrade I couldn’t shake the image of the great man in his boxers seated on the edge of his bed… the phone held at just the right distance from his mouth to get a perfect sound level and no distortion. But the point is - that’s a hotel room - an office away from an office, not a home away from home.
Being naked on the phone is really distacting. At my age I’ve stopped taking the sight of my naked body seriously. It has become an object of derision to me as it must be to every young person I pass on the street. I’m sitting in a towel at my desk - my diary out - pencilling in a date with the foreign editor of a major newspaper and all I can think is if she could see me now - she would never hire me to do a thing.
Remember all that futuristic nonesense about video phones? There is a use of technology whose time will never come.
