Last week, as I was working from home, a beautiful rainbow appeared in the sky.  As I watched it, I was reminded of the gray cubicle wall that I usually stare at in my corporate office, and of the many years, I desired to work from home, but was unable to.

The first time I remember wanting to telecommute, was back in my early college years, when a professor discussed how it was technically possible to dial into our mainframe campus computer and do work without physically being on campus.  As someone who spent many evening hours and sometimes early morning hours hanging out in the campus computer facility, I blurted out, “can we do that?”.  The class erupted in scoffing groans and laughter.  Yes, it was a really stupid question back in the late 70’s, but the mere thought made my imagination run wild and I briefly lost the filter in my adolescent brain that kept me from asking public questions, lest I suffer exactly that sort of public ridicule by my peers.

Fast forward about four years to graduate school and I had just purchased my own Radio Shack TRS-80. I was able to dial into my graduate school campus on my 300 baud modem and complete class assignments without going to the computer center.  I thought surely that when I entered the workforce, telecommuting would soon be in my future, and I would be able to avoid spending 40 plus years of my life surrounded by cubicle walls.

Alas, when I entered the workforce, I suffered a technology setback, learning that I couldn’t connect to the corporate computer except when I was physically at the company’s work-site.  In a few years, I learned enough that I was “promoted” to be on-call at nights to fix computer issues which arose when the nightly computer batch jobs crashed.  So, at random times during the night, I would receive phone calls waking me from sleep, and be called upon to triage the problem.  Sometimes, these issues could be solved by asking the operator to rerun the job.  Other times, if the problem was critical, I would need to drive into the office, log into the computer from my desk, and fix something on-site.  Sometime in the mid 80s, my company acquired these sewing machine case sized “portable” computers, to drag home with you when you were on call.  We could dial into the computer over the phone line at 14.4K and not have to drive into the office to fix issues at night.  The company trusted me to do my job remotely at night, but during the day, I was still expected to be there at least 9 to 5 so that I could make an “X” on my time sheet and so my supervisor could stop by to make sure I was working instead of reading “Computerworld”.

In the late 80s, I began attending an IBM user group called “GUIDE” and became involved as a volunteer helping to schedule speakers for their tri-annual face-to-face conference meetings.  At each conference we would schedule the speakers and sessions for the next meeting through the GUIDE scheduling system.  The system was very cantankerous and several of us plotted to rewrite it using “modern” technology (read Windows).  We presented our proposal to the GUIDE board, who approved a project for us to build new Windows-based scheduling system.  We set up a bulletin board system that we dialed into in order to exchange code.  Using weekly telephone conference calls and about six face-to-face meetings we delivered our finished product in a little over a year.  Now, I really wondered, “Why do I need to be in the office to do my job?”.  My ideas fell on deaf ears, but I was still allowed to work remotely at nights when I was on-call.

Next, came the advent of the internet in the mid-90s.  At GUIDE, we had several speakers who discussed how their companies were running telecommuting pilot groups.  “Surely”, I thought, “telecommuting must be coming to our company soon”.  By the late 90s, we were able to get 1+ Mbps line speeds to our homes, but still, telecommuting remained elusive.  No one seemed to be able to tell whether you were actually working if they couldn’t physically see you doing it.

In the mid 2000s, my company learned to trust remote workers enough, that it outsourced most of our programming jobs to India; however, in the U.S., we still had to spend every work day staring at our cubicle walls.  Finally, around 2010, our home office ran out of its very expensive desk space.  In a stroke of brilliance, they decided to have two people share each desk and have everyone work remotely two or three days a week, effectively doubling their office space capacity.  Out in our back water location, telecommuting eventually trickled down to us and we were offered the opportunity to work remotely up to two days a week, if we signed a telecommuting contract with the company.   However, the conditions of the contract were very rigid, and my commute was only 10 minutes, so I declined to participate.

Today, I have the flexibility to telecommute on the days that it makes sense based on my schedule.  Unfortunately, not all departments grant this flexibility.  In the year 2015, in spite of the many technical advances, there are still cultural taboos that restrict telecommuting.  At this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever have a pure telecommuting job, but it is still nice to escape the gray cubicle walls and occasionally be rewarded with the unexpected view of a rainbow instead.