Jeremy Joan Hewes is also sold on telecommuting. “Can you work at home?” Hewes’s own boss asked when he hired her for PC Magazine, an independent publication for owners of the IBM PC.
“That’s where the computer is,” she replied happily.
It made sense. Hewes had her North Star micro there, after all. What’s more, she’d written a book on “worksteaders,” as she called them, and by her late thirties had worked at home most of her professional life. So why not use her North Star there and modem her stories in? She might even edit others’ articles sent over the phone lines.[lines.] The magazine wouldn’t have to jam another human sardine into the cramped offices it then occupied above a restaurant in northwest San Francisco. She could work better alone. The pay would be the same for her hundred hours a month. And she could enjoy tax breaks on computer equipment, supplies, even some of her rent.
The magazine, in return, ended up getting more than five thousand words a month from her, sometimes double that amount, while, at the same time, as an associate editor, she regularly oversaw at least one other writer. She also did additional work for which she was paid beyond the hundred hours.
“It’s a lot less chaotic at home,” said Hewes, who also was writing books. “I don’t have to dress up. I normally wear jeans or corduroys. I can start work at dawn in my bathrobe and answer the phone that way if it rings while I’m headed for the shower. I don’t have to drive through traffic jams every day. Or stand up for twenty minutes on a bus, hanging on for dear life to a pole, jolting along the street. I work in surroundings I’ve created.”
She created them with both the IRS and aesthetics in mind. Her apartment, near the Golden Gate Bridge, was on the second floor of a seventy-year-old house with high ceilings and leaded bay windows. A bookshelf and wooden cabinet set the computer area apart. Her keyboard and video screen were atop a custom-crafted table with fruitwood edges; she can work alongside her cocker spaniel-poodle, and through the bays she could see a doll-repair shop. It was vintage San Francisco. No matter that neighbors’ punk-rock music once besieged her ears or that practice pitchers sometimes thudded tennis balls against the house or that apartments cluttered what once were sand dunes. Several times a day she switched on her answering machine, a device she deemed necessary for worksteads. Then she’d swim laps at a nearby pool or walk her dog amid cypress and eucalyptus trees, perhaps with friends, perhaps alone, perhaps mulling over future articles for PC, where she once warned would-be telecommuters of the need for “regular breaks from the concentration of work.” At the same time she lectured herself and others on the need for self-discipline. She trained her friends to realize that she was earning a living, not goofing off—a confusion that may fade as telecommuting becomes a more mundane pursuit.
She kept her sanity and a schedule—well, a writer’s equivalent of a schedule—by remembering how she had promised to research X material by Y date and how she would complete an article on time. “I go to an editorial meeting,” she said, “and I say, ‘Here’s what I want to write for the March issue.’ They say, ‘Oh, gosh, someone else is doing that,’ or, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or, ‘Fine, hand it in by the fifteenth.’”
“Rarely,” Hewes said of her editors, “can I imagine them calling me at eight in the morning to transmit a story in an hour.”
Mostly, in fact, she sent in her stories at night through her computer. Her IBM—she loyally bought one to replace the North Star—talked over the phone to the magazine’s machine with an automatic-answer modem. She could tell the office computer to save her copy on a disk. Except for light editing and formating, no human normally needed to type another keystroke; PC’s computers tied in with the printer’s.
It sounds HALish, depersonalized, but like Fuller, she and others at the magazine tried to infuse their work with as much warmth as they could.