The daily commute

I love my commute.  The only problem is that I have to drive through my home to get to work.

I work from home, so I don’t have to travel very far.  My office is at the end of the hall upstairs.  Exactly 10 paces and 18 steps from my front door.  So, once I drop the kids off at daycare, you’d think it would take all of 5 seconds to commute up to my office.  Right?

Wrong.

One of the downsides to working from home is that the line between work and home becomes very easily blurred.  And so, even with the kids out of the house, my working environment (as well as my path to work) is filled with detours.  My typical commute actually looks like this:

Take two steps in the door, and realize I haven’t had my coffee.  Turn right into the kitchen, where the full, unsipped cup of coffee I poured this morning now sits, cold.  Pop it in the microwave.  While I’m waiting, I put a Pop Tart in the toaster and unload the dishes.

Pop Tart is done.  I head upstairs with my drive-through breakfast, but don’t get more than 10 feet before I run into a traffic jam underfoot.  Literally.   Chip has decided to create a parking lot out of matchbox cars on the hardwood floors.  It’s a disaster waiting to happen.  I know if I don’t clean them up now, something bad will happen later on.  Like this:

And you know Ginormica makes it look a lot more fun than that actually would be.  So I eat my breakfast while cleaning up the traffic jam.

Halfway up the stairs, I realize I forgot the stupid coffee.  Again.  Make a u-turn back to the kitchen, and rezap the once-again frigid cup of coffee.

While the coffee’s reheating again, I notice the cat needs clean food and water.  Detour to the laundry room to fetch Booyah’s food and refill her water.  While I’m in the laundry room, I switch over the laundry and throw in a new load of whites.

I head upstairs again.  This time, I do remember the coffee, but I realize I can’t carry it upstairs along with the basket full of clean clothes.  So I take the laundry basked upstairs and deposit it in our room.  While I’m there, I notice that Bobo has spilled goldfish crackers in our bed, and that Dora is still on.  I switch off the TV, clean up the goldfish crackers, and am finally ready to start working.

I do a 180 back down the hall to my office.  Finally.  But, dammit… I still haven’t had my coffee!  Make yet another u-turn down to the kitchen.

By now, the detours have taken me to work in a very roundabout way.  What should have been a 5 second hop into my office has now taken me about 20 minutes.  Just 10 minutes shy of what it used to take me to drive into my downtown office.

This time, I get smart.  I pour my coffee into a travel mug, where it’s guaranteed to stay warm through even the longest commutes.

You never know what kind of traffic conditions you’ll run into on the way to work.