Workers have said enough to all the hype, technology, and wonders of working at home. Telecommuting appears to be a bigger bust than the New Coke. Beginning in 1998, an estimated annual growth for work-at-homers of 4% will decline to 1% by 2003 and stay that way through 2006, so says FIND/SVP, a company that says things like that.
It looks as though folks have had it with the fast pace of change associated with new gadgets and our modern world. Sure, great results are possible, but who can keep up to fully understand or appreciate them?
People have proclaimed that it's time we digest and assess today's world before we continue to charge headlong into the Brave New World of the unknown.
To be sure, there are downsides to working out of the home -- kids for one. If you've got them, you know; they've got to be corralled, occupied, and kept quiet while you're doing your work. And that's no small task. Any parent knows that children consider themselves your only valid work enterprise. Your office stuff is merely ancillary -- they're the only ones who matter. And what's worse -- they're right.
As for reason number two, high-touch is also often missing from high-tech. If you're not face-to-face, the quality of the exchange suffers. Perhaps centuries from now, live versus e-mail interaction may be indecipherable, but at this moment it makes all the difference.
All the fits and spurts associated with modern advances, especially working out of the home, are natural and probably healthy. We're moving from the Industrial Age to the Information and Services Age so we better be certain how we're proceeding -- we better get it right! These sorts of changes don't occur without resistance, pain, or even some degree of sadness for the bygone era.
Who wants to trade the known for the unknown? Some of us do, for sure, but not most. The devil you know is better than the one you don't, or so goes the expression. I heard that said many times during the last presidential election.
There's much wisdom about human behavior contained in that simple homily. While we all like new and exciting things, we usually want them on our terms and in our time, not someone else's. And we certainly don't want them to replace the old, the familiar, and the comfortable in a mere nanosecond as current technological changes seem to do.
So what if the world takes some time off for re-grouping and recouping from the information invasion and onslaught? What if the first 10 years of the next millennium become the Decade of Delay, or Dalliance, or Denouement? Don't we deserve a break? In historical terms 10 years is a minor blip, totally lost in the rounding-off process.
Introspection may be the key. We want to be sure of our next step. Determining the way in which we live is not some insignificant decision. This will influence how workers, companies, families, societies, and nations interrelate and communicate and there's no more important single factor in human relationships than how we associate with one another.
We have to be certain of where we're going. We've got to know it's the comfortable, right, and good road to travel. We have to believe that the Information Superhighway will bring happiness and not heartbreak.
But for right now, people are perfectly willing to sit in traffic and think. Think of alternative routes and options to the crowded Info Interstate. Think of the best way home.
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Fred W. Apelquist, III, M.Ed.
Approximately 590 words.
(c) 1997