I’ve done the work-at-home thing for a couple years now. Yes, I can get more sleep, and I don’t pay for as much gas as before. However, there are downsides you never hear about:

- Work-at-home is profoundly alienating. You never see anyone you work with. There’s nothing to connect you to your company, no reminders that you still work for a real company except the daily flood of email. Forget office romances (where over 40% of workers meet their romantic partners); you’ll never see that hot guy in Accounting or hot gal in Sales, another reason you won’t work out as much as you would if you had to work outside the house.

- You come to crave contact with real, breathing people. No, Facebooking and tweeting is not real social interaction. At an office you have to see and speak to actual people and be seen by them; if that’s not an incentive to work out and wear some decent clothes, I don’t know what is. I found myself inventing reasons to get out of the house (post office/grocery store/going to lunch) just so I could see that humans still walked the Earth.

Go to Starbucks to get a people fix? Sure. It’s healthy to go get a $4 sugar-and-cream-laden quasi-coffee drink to work on a non-ergonomic work surface in bad light surrounded by noise. BTW, I’m on the other end of the phone trying to hear you over the cappucino machine, crying children and the album-of-the-week. One healthful outcome: I wasn’t able to choke you to death for inflicting that on me.

- That ICT doesn’t work so well. The first 5-10 minutes of nearly every meeting are blown with trying to get the conference bridge to not broadcast the barking dog, or getting the desktop to share, or dealing with people who can’t get into the online teleconference. The rest are plagued with bad sound (VoIP sucks for sound quality in general; push graphics on top of it and it’s a joke), people too far from the speaker phone, trying to identify who’s speaking, and so on.

- At an office, you probably have one job. At home, you’ll have to be the whole company because there’s no one else around to do anything for you. You have to become your own IT department, your own HR department, admin assistant, shipping clerk…

- What makes you think home-cooked meals are any healthier than what you eat at work? When I worked in an office, most people I knew brought lunch from home. The snack food at home is more abundant and varied than what’s in the vending machines, but no better for you. And when you’re still working at home at 8PM, you’re going to get pizza or Chinese delivery, just like when you were at an office.

- There’s no separation between work and home. When you commute, you leave the job when you leave the building. When the office is your home, you live at the office. You get work phone calls after hours (especially if you work for a multinational), you check your work email on weekends…it never stops. Work-at-home is a pretext for corporations to get you working 24/7 for 40 hours of pay a week. Some of us are old enough to remember the concept of “working hours” and “weekend”; sadly, not so much anymore.

I suspect that not too long from now, a study will find that people who work at home for a company (rather than for themselves) are just as stressed, just as unhappy, far more alienated, and more prone to unhealthy behaviors (from Chunky Monkey to drug abuse) as their office-bound peers. We are by-and-large social creatures; we’ve worked in groups since we gave up the hunter-gatherer gig.

The state of California cannot mandate any part of the health care bill the US Supreme Court determines to be unconstitutional.

Federal always supersedes state. PERIOD.

This is another prime example; that California state legislators and senators have no idea about what they are doing, but wasting tax payer funds.