My Daddy Works in His Underwear

MyDaddyWorksInHisUnderwear.com is for dads who work from home.

Teleworkers or 1099ers. Corporate citizens and entrepreneurs. If you work from home — even occasionally — then this site’s for you.

And the people who love (or tolerate) you. Or appreciate the commitment you’ve made and the challenges you face. Or the fun you have — even sometimes at your own expense.

Working in your underwear is not mandatory (fully clothed is acceptable, as is commando). But it’s about a mindset, a perspective that says, “I work where my life is.”

And my life includes three kids, a wife, a dog, a hamster — and all the trappings that come in tow.

Coming soon will be a collection of stories from dads who work from home and the decisions that drove them there. Check back. Often. It should be a hoot for dads, moms, guys, gals and anyone who digs the workspace called home.

Even if you’re in your underwear.

Even as a home officer who occasionally works thriftily-clad, I can be an occasional road warrior. I go to hockey tournaments, host television media tours from NYC, watch Gator games at UF, and generally do my part to support the travel and lodging industries.

And, invariably, those trips involve sleep on the road.

So I often bring along that horse-yoke inflatable collar / pillow-like thing that’s supposed to keep me comfortable when I’m stuck in an airplane seat or slummin’ it at LaGuardia when bad weather’s cancelled my flight home.

What is the traveler to do? Blow up your TravelRest pillow.
Read More »

So the FedEx guy arrives at 730am today, and I answer the door dressed for work.

“Gotcha still in your bathrobe!” he boasts.

“No big deal,” I reply. “I work from home. Catch me this afternoon, and I’ll still be in my bathrobe.” We share a laugh.

Besides, it’s Halloween. I’m going as The Chief Home Officer.

All you home officers, teleworkers, 1099′ers, soloists, entrepreneurs, suburbanites & downtown dwellers, telecommuters, road warriors, enjoy the day.

And remember…

Trick or Treat! Any day.

Those who follow my Tweets on Twitter might have noticed an increasing sense of cycicism and sarcasm of late. Let’s not mince words here. It’s rage. Raw, freakin’ rage.

Today’s tweet: Memo from Main Street: BOLO for Wall Street’s honor. Feds slept as banks ran amok, debt grew, jobs wilted. CEOs bonused millions. Now what?

Seriously. Now What?! Bankers and international money managers (launderers?) bought enough sub-prime mortgages to wallpaper a thousand tracks of once-overpriced-now-foreclosed McMansions in the burbs. CEOs lied about their bottom lines, keeping federal regulators in the dark (though they were complicit in the process anyway, acting as if all was honky-dory in their scotch-n-Valium-induced stupor as a small fire sparked in a corner closet somewhere in Rome).

Today, Rome is a flash fire ready to explode. And Lehman CEO Richard Fuld pocketed $22 million in bonuses in March. Yeah, “You’re doing a heckuva job here, Fuldie…”

What does that have to do with entrepreneurship, the home office or us out here on Main Street? Everything.
Read More »

When I turned 40 four years and 37 days ago, I was mourning the lessons of time.

One of my closest friends — a man 20 years my senior — had just died. And I was growing older.

Two events – though unrelated – combined to leave a lasting impression. In their wake, I felt as if I was a patron of the Macabre Café. “Can I have the Midlife Crisis, please, with a side of demise.”

I hadn’t thought much of my birthday at the time; always an optimist, I’d felt “midlife” wouldn’t come for me until 45, the half-way mark of my two eldest grandparents at the time of their passing. But Alan was a special friend, and his death let the midlife beast creep into my thoughts.
Read More »

So I got an invitation to become friends or some such with a happy lass on FaceBook. Never saw her before, but because she posted her picture (with a Miller Lite in hand, no less), and she’s a Gator, and she looked like someone I might have wanted to party with (20 ago before I met my wife and the mother of my three kids), I declined the invite and short-circuited any potential temptation….

But “Kristen” also had a widget, or sidebar, or some such (whatever they call them over at FaceBook) on her site called “Smart People Humor.”

Minimum-mandatory notwithstanding, I clicked on the link.

It featured a book, In the Event of my Untimely Demise, from some guy named Brian Sack, someone I’d never heard of, but whom I discovered in short order that he was someone I’d wanted to learn more about. Apparently my home office IS a cave from which I don’t emerge often, as this guy gets more airtime than a Polymagist caught in a doctor-shopping Oxycontin scheme on a slow news week when Fox, CNN, MSNBC and KCCI in Des Moines are scrambling for a lead story.

Or when Paris comes out in a video with her own energy plan.

In one video clip, Sack was a guest on The Glenn Beck Show on Headline News, with his son, Antek (It’s Polish, Sack has to explain it every time. Tell me about it. Zbar’s Polish, too…), shilling his book. In another, he’s hyping perfect holiday gifts, including a pint-sized plastic baby with a cigarette in its mouth that when lit, burns like incense.

But I digress.

After arriving in my home office at 730am, I found myself almost two hours later having explored the Web, watched 20 minutes of Brian Sack videos, and realizing that I needed his book (the subhead read, “20 Things My Son Needs to Know”). Creator of the site Banterist.com, Sack is a funny guy. And he’s a dad. And I ordered his book. I’ll write back when I’ve read the back cover.

And I actually have something to say…

I just entered a contest for Freelance Folder (don’t try; entry’s closed). Celebrating their first birthday, founder Jon asked people for their best tips on running a freelance biz, home office / home-based or otherwise. Click here to see my response.

But there was more going on in my reply (”Persist“) than a one-word, catch-all missive that could be boiled down to some Motivational Speaker’s over-priced, self-obsessed rant.

I got to talking about birthdays and gifts and 19.5 years in freelancing and the classic line from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon: “Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death…”

And I got to thinking about my place in this place. Nineteen years as a soloist. NINETEEN FRICKIN’ YEARS! All but two of my professional years have been spent in a home office. Robbie and I have a 16 year old high school junior, plus a 14- and a 10-year-old for good measure, all of whom have come home from the hospital to a home with an office in it.

Damn, am I that old?
Read More »

News this week that George Carlin passed away suddenly — just weeks after being awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor — can only make this home officer and career writer consider some humorous scenes from his own life.

I’ve blogged about crazy dogs and screaming kids and unforgiving clients who just don’t get home officing. And I’ve never apologized for, to or about any of the lot. If George Carlin’s life was anything, it was unapologetic. If any home officer’s life should be anything in comparison, it should be full and rich and similarly unapologetic.

On my own deathbed I will not lament commutes undriven or neckties untied or vengeful co-workers or spiteful bosses left uncursed.

I will remember kids who came home to dad typing away on his computer or barking out to Keep It Down! as I was on a conference call or otherwise working from this place called home. I also will remember playing hard on Any Given Midday, and working like a whirling dervish before sunrise to meet a deadline.

Twain and Carlin were master wordsmiths and unparalleled cynics. Carlin perhaps was best known for his infamous and Supreme Court-worthy “Seven words you can’t say on television” routine. Such thought-provoking humor earned him that nod from The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The award was to be given in November. His name still will join that of such notables as Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin and Neil Simon.

He was a Grammy-winning stand-up comedian, writer and actor who enjoyed a 50-year career with 22 solo albums, three best-selling books, a host of variety of TV shows and movie roles. I blogged about him in reference to those Seven Words. - and even a few of my own. Lest one question his importance and relevance in American popular culture, George Carlin was the first host of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Yes, he enjoyed a tremendous career.

Strike that. WE enjoyed his career. Said Kennedy Center Chairman Stephen Schwarzman: Carlin makes people laugh, but also makes them think. Said Carlin to the AP on his impact on U.S. indecency jurisprudence earlier this year: “So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of.”

One more quote to consider, from Mark Twain himself: “Be good & you will be lonesome.” Methinks not, Mr. Twain. George Carlin was as good — and revered, and yes, probably loathed by some — as they come.

And at least today, he will be remembered as a pioneering comic spirit — no less than Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor or Twain himself — and a damn funny man.

This week was chock full of news related to Dad in his home - and home office…

- Mark Trainer had a piece in his Fathers & Druthers blog for The Washington Post on how Dads Are Still Saddled With Detached Image. The article explores the relevance of Father’s Day in the modern era when dads stay — or work — at home. But I got neither a Wii nor the new Death Cab for Cutie CD. But I did get the chance to sleep in, which for this over-worked work-at-home dad is pretty important indeed.

- An element common to at-home workers is the balance we seek. Cindy LaFerle had a piece “In the middle of this road we call Life” , her new recurring column for the Michigan’s Women’s Forum. Learn more at Cindy’s site, Cindy LaFerle’s Home Office. A new addition to the home office blogosphee is SOHOBlog.org, a site ostensibly created to “guide home officers on the right path through a business maze to achieve a unique corporate identity.” I couldn’t find a person associated with the blog (”Admin” doesn’t count), and most of the pictures plainly were of corporate offices — or very well-endowed home offices.

- In a follow-up to last week’s Work-at-Home Father’s Day, here’s Entrepreneur.com’s take on Father Knows Business. “Move over, mom,” they write. “These entrepreneurial dads prove they know a thing or two about babies–and business.” According to the stats, “home-based dads become more common. The U.S. Census Bureau reported an estimated 159,000 stay-at-home dads in 2007, up from 143,000 in 2006.” Said one dad, “I think what you’re seeing is a fatherhood movement that’s mostly based in guys’ hearts, who want to be closer to their kids than their own father was with them.”

Have a great week, Dad…

When Mark Dobosz considers why he works from home, he need only look in the eyes of his three children.

And he needn’t go far to do it. As a teleworking dad since 2003, Dobosz has had his children close at hand each work day. And with that in mind, the vice president of development for SCORE (the Service Corps Of Retired Executives) and executive director of the SCORE Foundation penned the winning entry for this year’s Work @ Home Father’s Day “Why I Work From Home” Essay.

And though a teleworker, Dobosz travels extensively. Yet the quote of W.S. Gilbert, the English essayist, poet and creator of 14 comic operas (as part of the duo Gilbert & Sullivan), as residing in Dobosz’s email signature, sums up what’s really important: “It isn’t so much what’s on the table that matters as what’s on the chairs.”

With that, the following is this year’s winner from the Work @ Home Father’s Day “Why I Work From Home” Essay Contest…

“An old proverb says, ‘When baking bread, you should bake bread.’ A telecommuting father proverb would probably say, ‘When you are working from home, you should enjoy the pleasure of having your work and family together in your care.’

“Working from home and telecommuting as a father has probably been one of the most liberating of all activities ever created for the male species. While the machismo perspective would be to reflect that a Dad can now do ‘everything,’ the more realistic enlightenment from working at home is that you don’t have to do everything. In fact working at home and telecommuting bring you more in touch and ‘doing the things’ which are really most important in life - family, providing for a family, your friends and believe it or not – yourself.

“Being a work@home Dad and telecommuting Father has taught me the gift of simplicity. Having my work and family intertwined allows me more effectively to live and focus on the simple – to recognize my own nobility of purpose.

“Being a work@home Dad has taught me to appreciate the proverb, ‘When baking bread, you should bake bread.’

“Better yesterdays are impossible to create. Definite tomorrows are only realized when they become today. The only certainty is found in this instance, this experience, this current reality. I am so grateful to be a work @ home Dad.”

And we’re grateful for your entry, Mark. For your efforts, you will receive a collection of home office supplies - and our thanks…