When I was my oldest son’s age, I had taken my fourth job in the greater LA area. I was living in the smog belt, and had the traditional hour each way commute.

My older son’s current job is in West Los Angeles, but the first of January he’s moving to Bordeaux, France, just because it’s something he’s wanted to do for a while. He’ll keep working, remotely, for the same company for as long as he wants to, but will probably migrate to something else over the next year or two.

Where the bleep was working remotely in the 1980s when I needed it?

I'm envious, too...you have someplace to stay when you're doing the wine tour of Bordeaux....

quote:

Originally posted by Doug:

Where the bleep was working remotely in the 1980s when I needed it?

Blame Al Gore. He hasn’t invented the Internet yet in the 1980s.

Where was the ability to work remotely in the 1980s? It was there. It was possible in the 1980s for some office workers at least. That’s when Lotus Notes came out. Notes allows multiple people to collaborate on work projects. Notes got eclipsed when the internet became popular. It also depends on your line of work. Some occupations can’t work remotely.

Sometimes it takes a crises in order for things to change. It looks like the pandemic enabled many people to have the ability to work remotely.

Where I work, it was flex time that became popular in the 1980s in which starting and ending times for working hours are flexible but you still have to work locally in the office and not remotely at home.

San Gabriel Valley? Smog was so bad when I lived there. Much much better now.

quote:

Originally posted by Mikhailoh:
San Gabriel Valley? Smog was so bad when I lived there. Much much better now.

Yes, SGV. But only for about 66 years…

quote:

Originally posted by Axtremus:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug:

hasn’t invented the Internet yet in the 1980s.

Typo. 1890s

I occasionally worked from home in the mid-1980s. I worked for IBM and I could dial in to the mainframe from a PC. At one point, we had three phone lines coming in to the house so we could use one for a computer, one for voice, and one for whatever else we needed a phone line for.

I could dial in to the university's mainframe, too. That was the bomb.

Of course, we were on a 1200 baud modem and the text ran across the screen about as fast as you could read it.

The good old days.

I remember flying in to LAX around 1980. The smog was so thick, lateral visibility was about a mile.

I know a few people who learned to fly in the LA area and they said sometimes visual flight was curtailed because of the smog... you could only fly on instruments.

I specifically became a writer so I could live anywhere. If people who actually had real jobs and made real money while living anywhere existed in the 1980s, I would have been one of them and have a much fatter savings account by now.

I wanted to be a salesman at one time.
A good salesman can live anywhere.
Aptitude tests indicated that I would starve if
I tried to live by selling. They were correct.
My charisma is such that I could not give food away in Biafra.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
I wanted to be a salesman at one time.
A good salesman can live anywhere.
Aptitude tests indicated that I would starve if
I tried to live by selling. They were correct.
My charisma is such that I could not give food away in Biafra.

Weren't you in real estate? Did it not go well?

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
I wanted to be a salesman at one time.
A good salesman can live anywhere.
Aptitude tests indicated that I would starve if
I tried to live by selling. They were correct.
My charisma is such that I could not give food away in Biafra.

Weren't you in real estate? Did it not go well?

My mother threatened to disown me if I did not work.
My father thought I should retire.
Who can tell whether a real estate agent is working?