26-year-old data analyst Lillian Kerr has nothing but positive things to say about working from home – even though, for her, “working from home” technically means paying seven to 15 dollars to work from an ill-spaced café instead.
“Working from home is amazing,” Lillian told reporters. “I save money that I would’ve otherwise spent commuting, I get to be comfortable in my own space, and there isn’t much noise. It also gives me the opportunity to squander all of those benefits in order to work from a cramped, crowded, loud café with no outlets and slow Wi-Fi instead.”
So smart!
“That’s what working from home is all about, right?” she continued. “Abandoning the free, cozy workspace where all your stuff is to go to the café across the street that seems like it was specifically designed to be impossible to do work in?”
Lillian’s roommate Brandon Masey suggests that’s actually the opposite of what working from home is “all about.”
“I understand the temptation of wanting to put on a little outfit and go sit on a rickety stool that could give out at any moment,” Brandon told reporters. “But what nobody ever tells you is that it is physically, psychologically, and emotionally impossible to get any work done at a café.”
He continued, “You’ll wait 10 minutes for a table to open up, drop eight dollars on a latte that you don’t even like, struggle to connect to the Wi-Fi, have one laggy Zoom meeting that could get you fired, stare at your computer for 20 minutes before it dies, then pack up and dejectedly walk home. I wish Lillian would understand this already.”
Lillian insists that she just needs a little break from her apartment for the time being, and that a café blaring “Ed Sheeran Radio” on Spotify is definitely the next best place to work on some spreadsheets.
Nothing like a little E.S. to get your productivity up!
“Sometimes I feel like the energy in my apartment is off, so it helps to go somewhere where the energy is objectively way worse to remind myself how good I have it,” she said. “Besides, without any in-person coworkers to distract me from my job, I need to go somewhere and seek out literal strangers to fill that role instead.”
At press time, Kerr admitted that she has spent more money at little cafes than she’s saved by not having to commute to an office. However, she says it’s all worth it because “they let me have a day-old scone for free that I didn’t eat.”
