Worcestershire Journal – Traveling to Work
by Karl - October 14, 2008 2:39pm
What Emily Dickinson called that certain slant of light is sharp, clear, and wonderful this time of year. Some of the leaves are down already, so more light streams in even as the sun is lower. It’s tempting to wax rhapsodic about the angle of the light, the colors of the leaves, and the deep, deep blue of the autumn sky. Nevertheless, I keep remembering what my old man said. “Whenever you can, take a job that’s to the west of where you live.” That way, you don’t have to battle the sunlight in your eyes, particularly around the equinoxes, when the sun is low in the sky in the morning and afternoon.
It’s not that I didn’t listen to him. (Well, not on this stuff, anyway.) I wanted jobs to the west of me, but rarely found them. In the last 25 years of work, I had one brief job to the north and another to the southwest. The southwest job was in Hartford, so it was an hour and change each way. The rest of the time, my jobs have been to the east. For seven years, I drove to Lexington, also an hour and change, and adjusted my commute to find angles where the sun wasn’t so much trouble. I had to make sure that my windshield was clean and that the wipers were good. All for a job. But, that’s what we do.
Funny thing, according to one profile, Worcester has one of the state’s best percentages of people walking to work. According to the Train Stopping blog, Worcester also has a very small percentage of people who take public transportation to work. In all, average commute time is about 25 minutes, plus or minus some. And you can tell by the eastbound traffic on I-290 each morning and westbound in the afternoon, that a lot of people are going to work in some place other than Worcester. According to SimplyHired.com, the number of jobs in Worcester has increased in the past year, but so has the unemployment rate. There are, I guess, more jobs to go to, if you have a job to go to.
For the most of us, though, it’s a commute to someplace else. Everyone has their favorite weird Massachusetts driver story and here’s mine: I was driving home from Littleton on Route 2 one snowy night. It was that heavy, wet snow with the big flakes that blocked your view of almost everything. Your headlights pretty much just lit up the snowflakes and gave little insight to the road ahead. So what did my fellow travelers do? Turn off their headlights, of course.
We knew a couple who were student ministers and had to commute from Hudson to Boston University. We asked them how they kept their ministerial standing while sharing the road with our special breed of drivers. “Don’t look them in the eye,” was their motto. They completed their studies and returned to Illinois, where the roads are straight and the drivers respectful.
Many jobs, however, don’t really require that you go into the office. As a result, companies are finding that telecommuting is a viable solution to many problems, not just traffic and the cost that long commutes extract from the human soul. You, as an employer, can reduce amount of office space because employees provide their own. A large percentage of IBM’s workforce (close to one-third) doesn’t have a permanent office in an IBM facility. They work from home or, as in the case of sales and services folks, they’re at customer sites a lot. EMC chairs the Information Technology Industry Council, an industry group that, among other things, offers incentives for telecommuting. Even the federal government has laws that encourage telework and has established a Telework website to support and promote telecommuting.
And, instead of watching my fellow travelers read the newspaper, put on makeup, eat cereal, or read their email while driving at 70mph on the Mass Pike, I can look out the back window, see the leaves changing colors, and remember that it’s time to bring the laundry in from the line.
I battle the dreaded SOLAR GLARE both ways every day. It is especially rough this time of year too!