When my office folks decided to shift to a new place that is far far away from my home, I was quite worried. Many people suggested that I could shift my house to somewhere near the new office. But I quite liked that place I lived in and was not ready to leave it. Instead, I was even considering quitting and finding work somewhere near home. I used to commute 6kms to work earlier and it was bound to increase to 24kms! I decided to try out the new place for sometime first and then consider what to do.
The biggest problem turned out to be the timings. Earlier, I would wake up leisurely, take my own time and start to work at my own discretion - sometime around 9 to 9.30am. Now I had to catch the bus to work as early as 7.30. That meant I had to wake up almost 2 hours earlier than I used to. My friends still say - 'so you wake in the mid night and run to catch the office bus'! In the early days I would miss the bus and drive down all the way. In the process, I discovered that the commute time is pretty much same despite the distance. The 6km drive in the city used to take me 45minutes in the busy city traffic and my new 24km journey would take me just 50 minutes! So the issue of commuting time more or less did not exist!
Overtime, I got used to waking up early and taking the bus to work. This in fact added to the commute time. Walking up the bus stop and waiting for the bus would add 10 minutes, and the bus being slower than a car took around 60 minutes to reach office. That was 25 minutes more than it took for me to reach my previous office. It was annoying indeed. But I did find some good things about taking the bus. I did not have to drive at least - some one else would take care of that. Besides I had this one hour of time to do something useful. I took out the pile of books that I had bought over last 6-8 months that I had not read for having been constrained of time. But in the last 2 months, I have read quite a few of them and have cleared a good part of the backlog. Now when my friends come home, see my books and if ask me I have read them all(believe me, people do!), I say 'yes' to most of the books unlike before. There are still a few books waiting in the queue but they will soon be exhausted.
I still miss the luxuries of working within the city instead of some far away deserted place. Working from this new place means I would miss my pretty big choice of restaurants for afternoon lunch. There are few places to hang around and kill time near the new office. If I have small chores to be finished, I will have to wait for the weekend since there are no amenities near office. I miss luncheon meetings with friends that I used to enjoy before. The new place is definitely boring and bad location to be working from, but the compromise does not seem to be as terrible as I dreaded it. Now getting used to it!
