Mark Lane: A work

This is my third year of working from home. Little did I realize in the pandemic year 2020, when I arrived home from the newsroom with a box of my stuff, that I had left the office for good.

It’s widely assumed that the "Work From Home" world is a life of convenience, good coffee and snacks in the pantry. A workstyle with no natural enemies. That the escape from office annoyances must be an escape from all annoyances. Hardly.

The top natural enemies of the WFH world are lawn-maintenance crews, working with their tactical leaf-blowers and car-sized mowers, followed by the door-to-door sales force. The first can be met with noise-canceling headphones. The second must be confronted.

Until I worked from home, I had no idea how large the door-to-door salesforce was. How widely they spread across our neighborhoods, “out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” to quote “Death of a Salesman.” Well, a smile, anyway. Few have a shoeshine anymore or even a recent shave.

I used to imagine them as characters from another era: encyclopedia and bible salesmen, the Kirby vacuum salesforce, the Fuller Brush man, the Avon-calling lady. But no, they are still very much with us.

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The most frequent are the lawn- and tree-service guys. They see my yard and assume I need a makeover. These are followed by the internet-services salesforce. I explain to them that merely contemplating the work required to change all the hookups and passwords of every web-connected device in my modern, internet-of-things household gives me the shakes.

The most persistent, the ones who went through sales training and watched motivational videos (“There are only two kinds of people in the world: customers and potential customers!”) are the solar-panel salespeople. Some of them imply they have some kind of connection to Florida Power & Light (they don’t) and demand that you explain to them in detail why you are turning down their excellent offer.

I’m a polite guy, but I had to shut the door on one of them in mid-sentence. It was turning into a debating society exercise.

Worse are the free roof inspection people. They seem particularly suspicious and are often mentioned as a factor in the skyrocketing cost of Florida homeowners’ insurance.

A few months back, I had one come by who implied that he’d likely find hail damage on my roof and had, indeed, already found hail damage on other nearby roofs. Something that seemed remarkable since the recent hailstorm happened miles away and there hadn’t been weather like that on my block for years.

I know I’m more wary and uncomfortable with all salespeople, even the upright ones, than the average person. That’s because I’ve learned that on first impression I can come across as distracted, even confused. Kind of a flake. Salespeople read this and mentally start calculating their commission. I see myself as a hard-nosed reporter; they see a chump, a rube, a guy who’s up for the deluxe, platinum-level, extended lifetime warranty with all the extras, just sign here.

This has only gotten worse as I got older. I cannot walk into a car dealership unaccompanied by an adult to deflect things.

So when the sales force somehow tracks me down to where I live, I’m not only interrupted in my WFH duties, I feel targeted. How do they keep finding me? How do they know?

One more aspect of WFH life that I hadn’t been expecting.

The News-Journal has been fortunate to have hosted many columnists over the years, all with distinctive voices. Readers still stop me to recall the late John Carter (“Sunday Punch”) and Bob Desiderio (“Dear Desi,” “Remember When” and “City Hall Beat”). Mary McLachlin (“Here’s Mary”) is another familiar name to an earlier generation of readers. She died last week at the age of 83.

Mary was The News-Journal’s environmental reporter at a time when few regional newspapers considered that a real beat. She also was a columnist and sometimes passionate editorial writer. She went on to become the environmental reporter for The Palm Beach Post.

In later career, she was a writing coach who could parachute into your newsroom and inspire everyone to do better. People were always better for knowing her, but reporters in particular.

She was a tall, raw-boned woman with a laugh that would make every head in the restaurant swivel toward your table. Her voice always carried the marks of her rural Kentucky girlhood. “Hey, sweet pea!” was the way she always greeted me.

I’ll surely miss hearing that greeting.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is [email protected].