Months of pandemic teleworking have left some missing their commute
Even when Shayne Swift works from home, the high school principal ends her day behind the wheel of her forest-green Jeep Liberty, chatting by phone with family and friends.
But Swift isn’t driving. Usually, she said, she sits parked in her driveway in Northwest Washington — the closest she often gets to something she has dearly missed during the pandemic: her commute.
Of course, she said, she doesn’t miss the traffic. It’s the 30 to 45 minutes built into her mornings, when she thought through her day or laughed along to a radio show. The drive home, she said, allowed her to catch up with loved ones via speaker phone, leaving her more present with her husband and daughter by the time she arrived home.
“I feel like I’ve been deprived of that quiet time I normally had in the mornings,” said Swift, 48, who recently returned to her office at the Girls Global Academy public charter school a couple of days a week. In the evenings, “I miss the solitude of the drive.”
Commuting often conjures up teeth-gnashing traffic jams, stifling subway cars and withering waits for the bus. When offices shuttered in March, social media rejoiced with workers celebrating their new commutes to the couch.
But after more than nine months of teleworking, some say they have come to miss the reliable and even forced time to gradually move into their work days and wind down into home life. Without a morning commute, they say, they tend to log on to their laptops earlier. Walking downstairs in the evenings often doesn’t provide enough mental buffer between a demanding boss and the dinner table. ...
The bureaucrats needs to be given a good
