The best place to work

I’ve been noticing a lot of debate lately about the relative merits of working at home versus going back to the office. Some of us can’t wait to get back to commuting and interacting with in-person humans. Some of us would rather not budge.

There are ecological choices to be made here too. Do we save the planet by not driving to work or do we save the planet by centralizing commerce (mostly food deliveries)?

Why does everything have to be a huge debate?

It doesn’t. There’s a pretty obvious solution to the home versus office problem: the home office. No, I don’t mean it in the sense of a headquarters or a room where you hang out in pajamas. I mean a structure where your entire company lives and works together.

You’ll be at work and you’ll be at home. Kind of like college if the dorms were in the same building as the classrooms.

This works on so many levels. There’s no commute. You can hide in your room or you can hang with your office buddies. The freeways are unclogged and newly emptied suburban homes can be turned into low-cost housing, home offices for small businesses, or newly planted rain forests making oxygen.

It’s a win-win-win.

I can feel you coming up with objections.

What, for example, happens if your spouse is employed by a different home office? Where do you live then?

There are several ways of dealing with this. Divorce is a good option but, if you’d prefer to keep your spouse, you now have two homes. Call one of them your vacation home. Who doesn’t want that?

The second home is also convenient as a cooling-off space after an argument.

What if you hate your job? This, of course, is a natural state of mind. Even if the work is fine, you could despise your boss or the guy down the hall who doesn’t know what a shower is and won’t stop staring at you. How do you get away from the madness?

Easy. That’s where the “home” of the home office comes in. You lock yourself in your room and only come out when you absolutely have to. It’s not that different from working at a detached home — but you can have underlings take your work product down the hall and bring you doughnuts.

But won’t this cause a huge disruption in society? Won’t we become insular and cut off from a variety of world views?

Um, have you looked at society lately? It won’t be all that different.

Those of you in the real estate/employment business need to start planning for this.

Politically correct drinking. Sometimes a court ruling makes you want to have a drink.

I refer you to a Kentucky federal court ruling in a case in which two companies are suing each other over claims that they’re the first Black-owned bourbon distillery in Kentucky.

Among the issues in the case are whether it matters that one company’s bourbon was distilled in Indiana or that the other company pays someone else to do the distilling.

Raise your hand if you can tell the difference between Kentucky and Indiana distilling or if you care who distilled first.

Sometimes I think someone must have been drinking before deciding to spend years on court.

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