CASCADE LOCKS, ORE. — I’m always a little slow to react to trends. (Did I ever tell you the story about the time 20 years ago when I told the Verizon publicist I wasn’t going to write a story about texting, because I was sure it would never become popular?)
Nonetheless, I decided to leap onto the bandwagon of remote work this week. Of course, I was a year behind the times. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, The Columbian pivoted in the course of about a week to offer remote work to newsroom employees. All but a handful immediately took us up on the offer.
I haven’t seen some of them since! But with almost everyone gone, I thought there should be someone in the newsroom to listen to the police radio and handle whatever might come up on the premises. So with few exceptions, I have been in the office on work days.
Some others made the same decision, and most days we have a core group of a half-dozen people in the office. As the pandemic has waned and the vaccinations have taken hold, more people have joined us, but most of us are still working remotely. We don’t plan to ask most employees to come back until January, and we will offer permanent remote work to a few.
I got my idea to try remote work when watching a TV show where people look at several RVs and then decide to purchase one. In the episode I was watching the people planned to live in their motorhome and telecommute.
